DEV Community: Zorex Salvo

Being Honest in Job Interviews

Zorex Salvo — Sun, 08 Mar 2020 15:23:12 +0000

Is it much better to be honest that you don't know the answers to some of the questions? Is it worth it overselling yourself eg. have the "fake it til you make it" mentality? These were my questions to my colleagues last Friday and I'm gonna share some of their answers.

Personally the former is better than the latter and I have been doing that for the last 4 years that I am in the Tech Industry. But I have a friend that says bluffing works and for some, it really is in their strategy. To me, the only pro of bluffing slash fake-it-til-you-make-it strategy is you getting the job, consequences will follow. But if you are totally honest, there are far more pros than just getting the job.

Here are some of the pros that my friends I experienced going with the honesty path:

Peace of mind. If you were totally honest, you would not worry about the consequences. You're not setting unreasonable expectations for the company. If they accept you despite not knowing it all (but of course with the drive to learn things you don't know), that's one of the traits/cultures I look for the company I'm joining.

Comfortable discussion. Being honest drives longer conversation. It naturally becomes a two-way interview. You are allowed to ask about something you don't know and based on experience, companies are much willing to talk about themselves, how they do things.

Proves that you are good to work with. Alongside with good attitude, people that know what they don't know are good to work with.

You still get the job. If they hire you, it doesn't stop on what you only know at the moment. You have to do the work. Work on what you are lacking.

The con of it is, of course, you not getting the job. That means you are not the candidate they need at the moment. But on the bright side, you didn't leave bad impressions on the company.

What are your thoughts?

You Should Try Attending Conference Abroad Too!

Zorex Salvo — Sat, 30 Nov 2019 09:06:49 +0000

It was really fun!

I just wanted to share with you my experience when I attended a conference abroad and how I decided to do it.

It has been three years since I started volunteering in organizing PyCon here in the Philippines. Every year we are meeting friends from outside countries so I thought why shouldn't I go to their conference too? Encourage by our local community and through our self-improvement program called PythonPH Kaizend, I decided to register to PyConID2019.

It was a YOLO move for me to do that actually because that would be my first time to ride on a plane, 14-hour flight with a layover excluding the delays, yes it would be my first time to go outside the Philippines too. It was so overwhelming so the first thing that I did was I went through the organizer lists and luckily I saw one familiar name, Doni, he was a speaker on our PyCon. I emailed him and he was very accommodating. That lessened my worry.

Fast-forward to pre-PyCon preparation (Nov. 22, 2019) I was invited by Doni to attend their committee meeting. I was hoping I could help but I didn't make it on time. The work was almost done, swag bags are already packed and they were already wrapping up. They were ready!

After the preparation, we proceeded to the Team Dinner!

Meet the PyConID2019 Team

Here I met also other people from other countries like Japan and Taiwan.

Python Conference
Indonesia 2019
November 23, 2019 Surabaya, Indonesia

We met with Jake from PyCharm at the booth area before the conference registration table. He was on our PyCon too! It was so good to see familiar people and catch up with them. After that, we went straight to the auditorium to listen to the first Keynote Speaker, Dr. Ir. Inggriani Liem, with her talk "A Journey to be a Good Software Engineer". I enjoyed her talk even though it is in Bahasa. Everyone was laughing and enjoying her talk too!

Next Keynote was from Fauzan Erich Emmerling, Mobile Product Engineering Lead at Gojek, with his talk "How Python Changed My Life"

zorex salvo

@zorexsalvo

I am seeing myself also talking about this in maybe 5 years? 🙊 #PyConID2019 I learned a lot from this talk @femmerling

09:29 AM - 24 Nov 2019

2 29

This talk made me re-think how should I code, or how should I live? haha. He talked about simplicity, about the philosophy Python Programming is using, he talked about the Zen of Python.

Post PyConID

There are lots of friends that I made at this conference. Hope I will see them again soon: Abhishek, Tegar, Iskandar, Noah, Takanori, Doni, Josef, Farah, Jake, The Pro-Gamer, Ady, and many more

Self-Hosted Git Server with Gogs

Zorex Salvo — Sat, 03 Mar 2018 05:29:38 +0000

What is Gogs?

Gogs (gogs.io) is a painless self-hosted Git service.

If you want to have your own GitHub-like service, it’s the best choice for me, since I made it work in less than an hour. Maybe you’re thinking, why would anyone want to create another service like GitHub when clearly there is already GitHub? Me, I needed to have private repositories for some of my projects. I can’t do that in Github unless I upgrade my account to a “Developer” plan for $7/month. To be honest, for me that is already expensive, to pay $7 just for private repositories, or maybe I’m just really poor. I’m not descrediting GitHub in any way, for public repos I’ll still choose GitHub.

First Things First

You’ll need: to have atleast basic knowledge on docker, and you need docker installed on your machine of course. PS, GOGS installation don’t have to be always dockerized, there are also bare metal installation guides but just for this post and the resources that I have we’ll stick to the docker version, also you’ll need a VPS for it to be accessible in the cloud.

When you’re done with the first steps, just pull the official gogs docker image:
$ docker pull gogs/gogs

You’ll also have to create a db (mysql, postgres, etc) container so:
$ docker pull postgres

Once db is ready, you can already run your gogs-container:

$ docker run --name gogs -d -v /var/gogs/:/data gogs/gogs

After that, once you open the address, you’ll see the Web UI Server Configuration where you’ll key-in all the server details, database, application name, administrator, host, domain, etc. Once you finished all of that, you’re now good to go.

For you reference:

I’m hosting it (together w this personal site and other personal apps) on a vps (1GB RAM, 1CPU Core, 20GB SSD Storage, 1TB Transfer, 40Gbps Network In 1000Mbps Network Out) for $5/mo; I bought my domain from Godaddy for less 1$; am using nginx for reverse proxy.

For personal git server, Gogs is really my to-go server. I haven’t had any problems setting it up, it has the essential functionalities you are looking for a git server, and it is really lightweight!

Pet Projects: How to stay motivated doing it?

Zorex Salvo — Sun, 01 Oct 2017 12:58:31 +0000

Hi everyone, do you have new project ideas? Have you finished your previous one? I doubt it!

So I have a question to "The Chosen Few" who actually finished their pet projects (especially if those projects are not your day-to-day job), how did you do it? Any advice?

Also, I am encouraging everyone who has a working in progress pet project to share theirs in the discussion box. And just maybe, if we knew that anyone may check our project, it may motivate us more to finish it.

I'm fairly new to JS but mine is here: http://shop.zorexsalvo.xyz
Source: https://github.com/zorexsalvo/vuecommerce

Vue.js, I choose you!

Zorex Salvo — Fri, 28 Jul 2017 08:19:53 +0000

Some time ago...

I was really overwhelmed by the enormous world of javascript. I was taken aback the very moment I dipped my foot in it.

Can you imagine? For almost two years, I am in-denial that I do not need to learn javascript or atleast try writing scripts with it. In my defense, I finished my thesis and graduated on college by just relying on how asp.net C# passes the data to the template and by just using the default javascript files from the templates, boilerplates, and frontend frameworks, as is. Lucky me, the task that I got on the first job that I landed is to create a WEB API. Everything is server side so I didn't have to do anything that concerns frontend development (I slipped through the inevitable again). But.... later on after finishing that project, I was asked to create a webtool for it, with dashboard, stats, etc. For a moment, I thought I can get away with it without writing any Javascript again. I thought Django template will be enough, I was wrong, I wasn't ready, but I have a task to finish. From that moment, I thought to myself, "You need to learn javascript, you need it!".

But before that...

I did what some of you, did too. To search for the very best js framework like no one ever was. [Search Google | top javascript 2017]

Based on that search keyword the top javascript frameworks for 2017 Q2 are ... *drum rolls* Angular, React, Ember, Meteor, Vue, and many more. Everyone has their own top tier JS Frameworks. For me, I just need to get started. So I picked the easiest one that would get me hooked easily. With so many blogs and articles for each of the frameworks, I already have these keywords in mind as I was skimming the articles and blogs: EASY and SIMPLE. So maybe you already know now why Vue.js, I choose you!.

Easy and Simple

For me as a beginner, those words are like a magnet. So I chose it right away. It is very much enough to get me started.

The very first thing that I did with vuejs is to create a Todo application. I found a step-by-step video tutorial of it on youtube:Academind. It was very fun. I didn't imagine that coding with frontend would be very fun and easy. But to be honest, with that video tutorial (<1 hour), with so many magics and all and I was clueless how vue did all of that, I didn't learn much, but my takeaway is I got to experience the awesomeness of Vue.

Since I was really hyped, I just continued my studying and experimenting. I started from the start. Code scripts on jsfiddle, learned about the directives, dom interactions, list rendering, and conditions. After I learned all the basics, I created a simple CRUD application called ideya, a repository of my ideas. My blog also have bits of vuejs in it.

I was really proud of myself after I finished this simple project. But I'm not still satisfied with my skills in Vue. As I am skimming through the documentations, I read about the vue-cli, webpack, components, and many more. I'm not stopping here. There are still lots of exciting things I have yet to explore in this framework.

My Journey to the Vast World of Text Editors

Zorex Salvo — Sat, 01 Jul 2017 08:46:32 +0000

Let’s start with the text editors that I used since the beginning of my programming journey.

The very first language that I learned is C, that was on my first year of college. I don’t remember the name of the editor. It is like a command prompt with neon blue background, gray menu and status bars, and bright green font. I don’t think it is usable for languages other than C though.

On the second year of college, we had Cobol, Java, and C# on our curriculum. On Cobol we used Notepad. On Java we used Notepad++ because plain Notepad is really lacking a lot of features like undo, syntax highlighting, etc. Then MS Visual Studio came, a very powerful editor/IDE, very powerful to the point that it drives my laptop then (3GB ram + core 2 duo) to its limit every effin time, though that time I always thought that Visual Studio is a gift from heaven because of its full-packed functionality. Drag and drop, intellisense, graphical interfaces, compiler, debugging, and many other good development tools. I continued using it from second year through fourth year. I think it is worth it to sacrifice my laptop to that resource hungry editor/IDE for an easier development.

Internship. I was accepted in a startup company. Startup, usually no proprietary software because of the expensive licenses so Microsoft technologies are no-no for them. The very first thing we did was to install an Ubuntu based linux distro-Lubuntu...Linux means goodbye to my favorite, Visual Studio sobs.

During my internship, I used Sublime 2 which is good also, and lighter than Visual Studio. It took a while for me before I really adapted to this new text editor because of the missing fancy functionalities. But this text editor shift is beneficial to me and my laptop that time because my laptop is already declining (serving me for almost 7 years) and not using intellisense made me improved in programming.

Being a professional. For a while, I continued using Sublime but Visual Studio Code came and now open-sourced, so I quickly shift from Sublime to VSCode and I never came back from using sublime again. Visual Studio showcased promising features again, like integrated terminal, git support, plugins.

I’m happily using VSCode until I developed a strain in my mouse hand. I searched for alternatives to minimize me holding the mouse then I discovered Vim. Pre-Vim I am not practicing correct typing which contributed to my straining hand, but learning Vim I had to practice home keys because the navigations, commands, etc rely only on the keyboard only. H, j, k, l for up, down, left, right, i for insert, v for visual. Those commands are really hard to press if you don’t know how to place your fingers correctly on the keyboard. What I liked in Vim is it is very lightweight, it runs on terminal and it is highly configurable. You can configure it to work like any other text editor because there’s lots of open-sourced plugins out there. Here’s my minimal vim configuration: vimrc.

Despite the steep learning curve of Vim, I’m not planning to venture out of this text editor yet. Maybe I need to stop by here for a long while. Cause this text editor and its plugins itself is a whole ‘nother journey.

Asynchronous Task with Celery and RabbitMQ

Zorex Salvo — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 01:42:50 +0000

Slow API Responses? Browser Timeouts?

Maybe you have very slow processes like external API calls, email or sms services, etc that do not really need to be processed synchronously before actually returning an OK response.

Last week, I experience that *awkward* pause/site hangs/infinite loading/"a few moments later" moment when I'm demonstrating my app to our QA. I didn't expect it to be like that honestly cause I never experienced that on my local machine. As it turns out, my processing is hanging on my emailing service part wherein I have to perform a request on our mail server via SMTP. The response time is very inconsistent, and unless the mail server responds or my process timeouts my app stays on that hanging state.

Worry no more! because the Rabbit x Celery combo is here for you. RabbitMQ will be used as the Message broker. It stores the queue of tasks then one-by-one it is executed by Celery. How to use it? I have here a simple python that demonstrates it.

First, you have to install celery and RabbitMQ:

pip install celery==4.0.2
sudo apt-get install -y rabbitmq-server

Then create a script called task.py:

touch tasks.py

On tasks.py initialize celery:

from celery import Celery
app = Celery('tasks', broker='amqp://localhost//')

Then, create the method, decorate it with your celery object for it to be recognized by celery.

@app.task
def create_a_slow_process_needs_async(job_name):
    print('Async job {}'.format(job_name))

After that you need to start your celery worker:

celery -A tasks worker  --loglevel=info

<console>
-------------- celery@zorexsalvo v4.0.2 (latentcall)
---- **** -----
--- * ***  * -- Linux-4.4.0-78-generic-x86_64-with-elementary-0.4.1-loki 2017-06-21 16:42:32
-- * - **** ---
- ** ---------- [config]
- ** ---------- .> app:         tasks:0x7fd374ebb210
- ** ---------- .> transport:   amqp://guest:**@localhost:5672//
- ** ---------- .> results:     disabled://
- *** --- * --- .> concurrency: 4 (prefork)
-- ******* ---- .> task events: OFF (enable -E to monitor tasks in this worker)
--- ***** -----
 -------------- [queues]
                .> celery           exchange=celery(direct) key=celery

[tasks]
  . tasks.reverse

[2017-06-21 16:42:32,523: INFO/MainProcess] Connected to amqp://guest:**@127.0.0.1:5672//
[2017-06-21 16:42:32,529: INFO/MainProcess] mingle: searching for neighbors
[2017-06-21 16:42:33,545: INFO/MainProcess] mingle: all alone
[2017-06-21 16:42:33,556: INFO/MainProcess] celery@zorexsalvo ready.

Then try executing the job in the shell:



Python 2.7.12 (default, Nov 19 2016, 06:48:10)
[GCC 5.4.0 20160609] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import tasks
>>> tasks.create_a_slow_process_needs_async.delay('Send email blast!!')
<AsyncResult: 41ba4299-77a1-421b-9c35-873347f98b14>

Adding Proxy to Your Docker Service

Zorex Salvo — Sat, 13 May 2017 13:14:48 +0000

This is only a personal note for my docker service configuration in office network proxy.

Have you ever experienced slow docker build even though your machine is on a network proxy?

Me? always.

Then this idea came from one of our interns. At first, what he did was to add environment variables inside his Dockerfile.

Seems a bright idea huh? but it is not a good one really because his image can be built only IF he is in our office network.

There came a problem where he did not know what went wrong with his build on docker hub because "It ran on local machine". The problem was the http_proxy cannot be resolved by docker hub.

Thats the exact opposite of the Build, Ship, and Run Any App, Anywhere catchphrase of Docker. It didn't even pass the build part kekeke.

Then another idea came up, what if we add the proxy on the docker itself so that we do not have to specify the environment variable HTTP_PROXY to the Dockerfile. That is a great idea!

Here's how to do that:

First, create a systemd drop in directory

mkdir /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d/

Then, create http-proxy.conf

touch /etc/systemd/system/docker.service.d/http-proxy.conf

## http-proxy.conf
[Service]
Environment="HTTP_PROXY=ip.of.your.proxy:port"
Environment="NO_PROXY=localhost,127.0.0.0/8"

Then, Flush Changes by doing:

sudo systemctl daemon-reload

And lastly, Restart Docker

sudo systemctl restart docker

To check if the environment variable is really added on your docker service, do docker info.

And pooof, notice the change in speed in your docker build!

AWS Summit Manila 2017

Zorex Salvo — Sat, 22 Apr 2017 08:06:41 +0000

*Cross posting this blog from my newly created personal website zorexsalvo.com

AWS Summit Manila is just one leg of AWS Global Summit that promotes Amazon Web Services. Their goal is to educate both new and existing customers around the world to be more successful with AWS.

Registration

An hour before the registration desk opened, the venue was already full-packed. There was already a queue for the early-birds. I was lucky to be one of the first 100 delegates because FREE AWS SHIRT YAY! AWS Summit Manila surely received an overwhelming response from their invitation.

Freebies & AWS Passport

After registration, we are instructed to get our summit kit and the FREE SHIRT. We also got our AWS Summit Manila Passport, it was like a stamp album, we had to collect stamps from the booths (summit sponsors and partners that uses AWS) and complete the album to redeem prizes at the passport redemption counter.

Booths Exhibition

There were a lot of exciting booths out there. There's Intel, Github, Globe Telecom, Telstra, WingArc, etc. Each of them has their own product that uses AWS. There are softwares for Big Data, there's one that is for Business Intelligence, there's another for AI or Machine Learning. The booths really had a lot to offer.

After the exhibition, Amazon Web Services Managing Director Nick Walton gave his warm welcome to the delegates of the summit. And the welcoming remarks proceeded to the opening keynote of the Vice President and General Manager Amazon S3, Amazon Web Services, Mai-Lan Tomsen Bukovec discussing the super powers the amazon web services have. Along the opening keynote, local companies that uses AWS had the chance to tell the story and the success they got after migrating to AWS.

Lunch Time

Not sure if AWS Summit Manila or AWS Food Summit hahaha. We never got hungry althroughout the summit because of the food counters.

Breakout Sessions

AWS Summit had two tracks for their breakout sessions. There are Business Transformation and Cloud Innovation tracks that run simultaneously so we had to pick just one. We went to the Cloud Innovation track since that was the track that piqued our interest. So each track had these breakout sessions, the track started with Internet of Things with AWS which is a great start. In just the beginning, they have already showcased bits of the cool things their platform can offer. There were topics also for DevOps, Automation, Application Migration, Serverless Solutions, Big Data, that they solved using AWS.

The End

I completed my passport just before the summit ended and proceeded immediately to the redemption counter, sadly I didn't get the grand prize. What I got instead was the happy tummy, the freebies, the stickers, the knowledge, the fun, and the experience provided by this one-day summit.

Zorex Salvo, Junior Developer

Zorex Salvo — Fri, 17 Mar 2017 23:52:09 +0000

I'm from the Philippines.

I have been coding professionally for a year now.

I am a developer in a startup company and I am using Python/Django for most of the projects that I am doing.

Being exposed in the startup culture, I became fascinated with the whole tech community.

I attended hackathons, meetups, and summits since then.

Being a developer in a startup is both exciting and challenging. We got to try a lot of modern and trending technologies what we referred to as our new toys. But in exchange we have a lot of things to study. We have to be full-stack.