Month: April 2020

Weekly: Circuit Breaker

It has been 3 weeks since Singapore went into Circuit Breaker mode, which is pretty much a semi lock down situation. Been working from home a month or more now and I’m slowly getting really bored of the stay home lifestyle.

That said, I am thankful that I’m in the line of profession that allows me to WFH without much issue and business still goes on as usual. On brighter side of things, mentioned that I bought a new NAS last week, and it arrived this week. It’s definitely a huge upgrade over my old WD MyBookLiveDuo. (2 bay NAS). I remember that when I bought it over 7 years ago, it was the most expensive purchase in my life.

Synology DS918+

Why did I get something that was released in 2018? Well, because the new refresh for it was $200+ more and the only advantage was that it has an extra drive bay. I heard that there will be a new edition for this probably this year or next, but based on the past 5 years or so, there’s really not much performance improvements to expect from a NAS.

The configuration I ended up with was

Ram: 4GB
Drives: 4 X 6TB WD Reds
Cache: None (TBD)
Raid: SHR2 (similar to RAID6)
Usable space: 10.5TB
Network: 2 X 1gbps bonded

Weekly: optimize everything!

Post author By lordofgeeks
Post date April 22, 2020
No Comments on Weekly: optimize everything!

Well a bunch of things happened this week but I think the general theme is to optimize everything. It’s just something that I do from time to time cause gaining efficiency pleases my soul (like the cost efficiency from switching hosting provider).

Speeding up my zsh shell launch

I was feeling like my shell (zsh) launches have been getting slower and slower over time with additional plugins and packages to make my life better. But my workflow revolves a lot around the shell, so the waiting was starting to bother me.

TLDR; I managed to reduce the loading times from 1.xx seconds to 0.2x seconds.

The improvement was constant across various devices, some actually took more than 2 seconds cause of all the helper plugins I was using. But on average it was 5 times faster.

You can use this command to benchmark your shell speed.

for i in $(seq 1 10); do /usr/bin/time zsh -i -c exit; done

There was definitely a noticeable speed up when I open up a new tab. And it made my 5 year old laptop feel way faster than before.

What did I do?

Tags hostinger, optimisations, wordpress, zsh

Development Learning Weekly

Weekly: SG calculator

This is a side project that I’ve been working with my friend since last year but haven’t gotten many hours into it because … procrastination. But hey we finally have a MVP deployed onto Netlify and for the rare few people who somehow stumbled upon my blog, this is something you can check out.

TLDR; this is a quick calculator online designed to answer complicated questions regarding CPF and HDB (tbd).

https://sg-calculator.netlify.app

Even though I call it MVP it’s really still an early alpha and we’re still trying to figure things out and add more features to it. So there’s a high chance that things will just break from time to time.

Inception

We decided to work on this because planning for finance and housing in Singapore is quite a pain. While there are many calculators online that can give you numbers that you’re looking for, nothing is as simple or specific as, “How much do I have to save to retire with XYZ sum at the age of N?”.

Learning Optimization Weekly

Weekly: New hosting provider!

Post author By lordofgeeks
Post date April 7, 2020
No Comments on Weekly: New hosting provider!

Another attempt at reviving my blog after only 7 posts for the entire year. But I finally figured out what this blog can be used for.

So the history of my blog started with me just ranting about my thoughts and feelings, that was many many years ago when I first started blogging, there was barely any filter to the things that I wrote and it was a rant every single damn day. That changed when I became more concerned with privacy.

It started with writing my inner thoughts and feelings on a self-hosted WordPress instance inside of a VM, then that transitioned to pen and paper and I almost completely stopped blogging altogether. Last year, I made the choice start journaling on a very regular basis, using a journaling app called Journey. It was great! I wrote on a near daily basis and I felt like I have a better grasp of my life.

Then I started writing Medium articles to have a better reach to tech audiences, which was the original intent of this revamped blog in 2018. But this blog quickly died down cause it’s not easy to pump out articles like that quickly.

So what is the point of this blog then? This will be where I just spam/rant/note down the interesting things that I’ve done over the week, just purely tech related, because a lot of these thoughts and experiences have been omitted in my journal (it’s boring to write about those in a journal). I’ve set a goal of writing one per week, to consolidate the fun things that I’ve been up to.