DEV Community: Ben Adrian Sarmiento

Low-cost computer for the kids

Ben Adrian Sarmiento — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 02:57:23 +0000

Total cost: S$192.8 ($145 or ~₱7,000)

Components:

Dell 22" Touchscreen Monitor S2240T - S$66

Raspberry Pi 400 - S$113

Micro HDMI to HDMI - S$7

SanDisk microSD 32GB - S$6.80

The USB-C PD adaptor I use is from my broken RPi4 so it's free.

The S2240T also comes with an audio out jack where I use my old ATH-M50. You can also use a bluetooth speaker with the Raspberry Pi 400.

I installed Raspbian OS then ScummVM to play point-and-click adventure games (perfect for the touchscreen monitor).

The games you can get here or here. Enjoy!

An idea for an ultra low-cost online learning computer

Ben Adrian Sarmiento — Sun, 22 Mar 2020 17:47:23 +0000

Imagine a mini computer with a cardboard case running a very bare distribution of GNU/Linux stored in a 4GB micro SD card. It comes with a cable that has an HDMI connector on one end and on the other is an HDMI/RCA combo connector. The machine has two USB ports where you connect a keyboard and a mouse. It has a wifi chip and an ethernet port for internet connectivity. It comes with 512MB of RAM.

When you turn it on, it loads up a screen to connect to your network. When you're done configuring or if it has already been configured before, you then arrive to a TTY. You're auto logged in as a generic OS user, but you typed in /join class0123 student9876 to attend your class. The computer will poll a server until a live video feed comes online. You see your teacher on the screen and there's still a TTY below the video. The teacher starts the class, and interaction from the students are done via the TTY while the teacher responds over live video.

The teacher enables "quiz mode" where teacher asks questions in real-time and all TTY interactions are considered quiz answers. Since exact answers are expected from the teacher's multiple choice questions, you get instant feedback per question if you're right or wrong.

The teacher discusses some final pointers, but you're almost late in your next class so you type /leave. You join the next class. And the next one, then the next one. Your done with your classes and you type /shutdown to call it a day.

Ideal cost of the total setup is $25.

A free personal file host on your command line

Ben Adrian Sarmiento — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 08:43:44 +0000

I'm a big fan of file sharing, but not through cloud storage solutions like Google Drive and Dropbox. There's so much bloat on their UIs that sways from the intent of just sharing a file to someone. I thought of managing my own FTP server but paying something monthly for the few occasions I'm going to share a file doesn't sound like a good idea.

Then came IBM cloud and their free offerings. The coolest thing about IBM cloud is they don't ask your credit card details to avail the free stuff. Plus their free tier is actually generous. Check Cloud Object Storage as an example:

That's 5GB of public outbound traffic. If I go only with sharing screenshots, that's a lot of screenshots I'll be able to share. And IBM COS is what I actually use as my file host. If you check the URL of the image above, it uses my domain files.bensarmiento.com which is just a CNAME a configured to point to my COS bucket. (OK, so apparently it isn't as everything goes through dev.to's image CDN which is Cloudinary)

Now to do the file host you need the following: IBM COS bucket, service credentials (you can setup this one when creating the bucket), and rclone installed on your local machine. rclone is a nifty tool for anything cloud storage, I suggest checking it out.

After setting up the bucket, if you want a subdomain to not expose the ugly IBM COS domain on the URL you can do that by adding a CNAME record with value s3.<region code>.cloud-object-storage.appdomain.cloud.

Next step is to configure rclone to upload to it. Easiest way to is to edit rclone.conf found in $HOME/.config/rclone/.

This should be what's inside (replace everything <that looks like this>):

[ibm]
type = s3
provider = IBMCOS
env_auth = false
access_key_id = <access key>
secret_access_key = <secret key>
region = <region code>
endpoint = s3.<region code>.cloud-object-storage.appdomain.cloud
acl = public-read

After that, the command rclone copy local.file ibm:<bucket-name> should work. Then in your .bashrc or .zshrc:

function upload {
    rclone copy $1 ibm:<bucket-name>
    a=`basename $1`
    b=`echo $a | urlenc enc`
    echo "https://<your configured url>/<bucket-name>/$b"
}

So now, you should be able to do upload local.file which will output you something like https://files.bensarmiento.com/ben-files/Screenshot%202020-02-02%20at%204.15.32%20PM.png.

Bonus: you can setup something like a URL shortener of some sort with this setup (if your bucket URL is short).

function redirect {
    a=`mktemp /tmp/goto.XXXXXXXX`
    b=`echo "$a.html"`
    echo "<meta http-equiv='Refresh' content='1; url=$1'>Redirecting to $1..." > $b
    upload $b
}

Hope other providers can offer more generous free tiers.

Programming in my gaming desktop (not WSL)

Ben Adrian Sarmiento — Sun, 02 Feb 2020 06:59:37 +0000

I have now successfully setup a development environment on my gaming desktop (Windows 10) that I am able to use for any programming language I choose. All that I needed to do was install Visual Studio Code and the Remote SSH extension. I am essentially connecting to a remote Linux machine and only doing the code editing in Windows. Others might consider this cheating but I think this is a lot better than setting up WSL especially with Docker containers (I don't want VMs in Windows.

The setup feels like I'm doing local development. I can access the remote terminal from inside Code, so all the git and docker stuff goes in there. I can even do code ~/.zshrc and it will open in my editor which I find really convenient.

Let me narrate to you step-by-step how I set it up.

I first bought a 1GB ram VPS from BuyVM for $3.5/month (my affiliate link). Storage won't be an issue even if there's only 20GB SSD storage in there as BuyVM offers a 1TB block storage for only $5/month. Please note that when paying by PayPal, use your PayPal email when signing up with them as it's one of their policies.

I logged in to the server as root, changed the root password then created a non-root sudo user. I copied my SSH key to that user with ssh-copy-id. Logged in again and upgraded everything, installed zsh shell and oh-my-zsh as I'm very used to those. Disabled root login and password login in my SSH server settings and then rebooted. I logged in again just to make sure everything works, installed Docker, configured git, etc.

Then I setup a subdomain for bensarmiento.com so I don't have to remember my IP address all the time. I used Cloudflare for this, it's free so I use it for all my domains.

Now in my gaming desktop, I fired up Code, installed the Remote SSH extension and configured a new host - ssh user@dev.bensarmiento.com or something like that. I tried connecting to it, typed in my key's passphrase and everything seems to work perfectly. Opened a folder which triggered a new window opening again and Code asked me again for my key's passphrase to connect to the remote host. Hmm... not ideal. It seems like Windows doesn't have a keychain agent running.

After a few googling, all I had to do is run this inside a root PowerShell

Set-Service ssh-agent -StartupType Automatic
Start-Service ssh-agent

Now Windows and Code will remember the passphrase the first time I type it in.

If you want the same behavior happening inside your VM (say when pushing to GitHub) I found the Apt package keychain solved this issue for me.

And that's it. Currently I'm working on this project called moon-http in my gaming desktop but the Lua/MoonScript runtime are all inside my VPS. I don't really mind paying $3.5/month to do this because I also use that VPS for other things such as a WireGuard server, etc.

Forming a tech team in the Philippines

Ben Adrian Sarmiento — Fri, 31 Jan 2020 14:05:59 +0000

Disclaimer: You might find this elitist, but there is no intent whatsoever to discriminate anyone of a specific background. This is solely based on my experience working with software/test engineers of different skill levels across 3 companies and spending the last 4 years doing recruitment, interviewing hundreds of developers.

In my opinion, the Philippine tech industry is catching up skill-level-wise, albeit slowly, to Singapore and Hong Kong tech hubs. The (majority of) push is not coming from the supply of tech talent though (the programmers) but more from the tech companies (usually from abroad) opening offices here and creating a demand for higher quality software engineers.

This is both good and bad news for you if you’re building a tech team here in the Philippines. Forming a team is easy and trivial, forming a good team is a different story.

Salary trend is up - way up

Higher quality means higher salary; it's very rare nowadays to get a really good engineer for a bargain rate. For the past 2 years, I felt that the job market rate has tremendously gone up for any tech-related position. This also means that Filipino tech employees are enjoying a higher quality of life.

Tech companies abroad are most probably coming to the Philippines because it is inexpensive vs other Asian tech hubs. Plus we're better English speakers, and the skill level gap is worth the savings. But I think not for long because if the tech salary trend continues, that cost advantage will disappear. On the other hand, if we are able to close out the skill level gap, the Philippine tech scene will continue to flourish.

Your recruitment budget will most likely define how fast you reach your recruitment goals. If you have more than enough budget, do not just give away money though.

Impostors

There's a chain effect from the positive salary trend that is being taken advantage of "impostors" - people who switch jobs after gaining enough "tool & process knowledge" and are able to get a higher salary just because of this. This type of knowledge won't get you far because this is very use case-specific - that new "experience" is now obsolete on the new job.

It’s a non-issue if the person possesses good fundamental tech skills as it will be just a question of when and that all depends on the person’s learning pace. When you form a team, you have to make sure an applicant’s skills isn’t reliant on the tools listed on his resume. Or when the applicant is left alone without a process or a framework, he/she should still be able to function and contribute value to the team.

Education

Our education system hasn't caught up YET. This I think is the most fundamental flaw of our tech talent source. At least for the developers I've worked with, especially those that are "below average", they had very little exposure on industry practices (common tech used, etc.), or they're very much used to the pace of learning antiquated tech from college. Even worse, both.

I am sure that this is already being addressed as I am writing this - kids are smarter nowadays anyway. But the ideal won't happen in an instant. There was/is/will be a period of time where we (will) produce(d) un-hireable graduates of tech courses. Add to that the tech industry is not for everyone. You need resilience as it is not uncommon for companies or projects to fail.

If your team somehow ends up with these types of developers, I think that teaming them up with good leaders who are able to set the bar high for the team is an effective solution.

Conclusion

Diversity in a team, even on the skill aspect, is always guaranteed to turn out good. Sometimes, non experience means thinking outside the box, which this industry needs more.

Starting something new for 2020

Ben Adrian Sarmiento — Sat, 11 Jan 2020 21:51:44 +0000

Recently, or just yesterday, I thought of making a video tutorial about programming. My wife has been pushing me to make a podcast (with her) but I can't really think of good topics we can enjoy discussing to make it a fun listen. Programming has been my passion and career so I thought why not do that instead and be informative. She's currently in a different country though, plus I am really bad at explaining in just words. So video it is. And just me.

After having a discussion with her, we thought teaching the basics (the right basics) first just for the curious people who want to learn programming will do. I am not really aiming for anything here and this is just my outlet to when I am alone and want to pass the time.

Why Svelte? I am aware that Svelte is not being taught at all in any schools as an introductory language. Maybe most schools might not even know something like Svelte exists. But I chose Svelte because of 2 things: first, web is the best platform to program for. Web is where you see everything converge. Your laptop, phone, everything is connected to the web. Everyone uses Google or Facebook. Second, Svelte is a lot simpler than Python if you know a bit already about HTML (and other web technologies). With Python you have to learn the language, and work on the command line. If you're just curious to know what programming is, learning something simpler but still something that can be a lot productive is a better approach.

So what is Svelte actually? Is it a new language? Yes and no. Yes because it needs its own compiler to work. It's built on top of JavaScript and HTML (no it didn't add anything to CSS… yet). Your old JavaScript and HTML codes will still work. But your Svelte code might not work (as you've expected) as just plain HTML and JavaScript without compiling it (with Svelte). And no because I still write valid JavaScript and HTML, and only for the UI-related behavior you write Svelte-only code (so you could say it's just a framework like React).

So that's my opinion of Svelte. If you think you don't agree that this is a good language to teach programming basics, let me know. For professionals out there, if I got you curious about Svelte, please check out Sapper. My ongoing video series can be seen here.