It all started with discussions with the amazing folks at VaccineHunters.ca on Discord. Back in May 2021, it was the early days of the availability of mRNA vaccines. Everyone was looking forward to having some form of protection, but the booking systems were all over the places and information were…

Think of your technology systems as a car: a tool that your company’s leaders use to get to their destination. When designing and building this car, critical elements must receive sufficient focus. Here is my Top 5 list. The engine and the drivetrain: The operating platform must be reliable and…

If you drive in North America or Europe, you often have to face this simple tradeoff: Time Savings vs. Toll Charges. The decision is actually not an easy one. Time Saving is dependent on traffic conditions on two different routes; even the toll charge is not straightforward because it varies…

I was curious to find out. Is upstart Mapbox just as good or better? Has Apple Maps improved sufficiently? What about the MapQuest which I haven’t explored in a while? Fortunately, all of them offer their routing engines as APIs. So, it’s possible to build a comparison tool to visualize…

For seniors, smartphones can be a source of headaches. The text are tiny (even on large screen models), its touch interface requires a lot of dexterity and typing on the soft keyboard can be difficult. It gets harder if your first language is not English. As a result, paying bills…

Developers and testers depend on a lot of infrastructure (from Active Directory, VPN, stable/secure/compliant environments) to do their magic. There are a few small, but not-so-obvious things that infrastructure teams can do to make their dev/test teams daily work easier. Overview diagrams and description of add-ons we use on top…

There are a few simple things you can do before that final commit to make your code more friendly to everyone. a) Your fellow engineers (and successors who you may never meet) will read the source, digest the change history, fix bugs and delete chunks of it gingerly in the…

I am particularly encouraged by tech giants like Microsoft (who has 3500+ open-source repos on Github) and Google who continue to embrace the open source ideals and give back to the community as they invent their next big things. Did a little giveback myself and open-sourced a Trip Simulator to…

Over time, I have learned that the promises of most new and shiny platforms are legitimate, but the downsides are rarely as well understood until you roll up your sleeves to build something with it. I gained some first hand perspectives recently after building cloud functions for two new Sidekick…