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Development Learning Optimization Productivity Thoughts

Productive 2 weeks in reservist

One of the duties as a Male in Singapore is to serve the national service, and we are called back between 1-3 weeks every year for our “reservist” until we reach MR or “operational ready”.

The past 2 weeks was my turn, and I decided to bring in a cheap $200 android tablet and a keyboard to see how far I could push it. In other words, I want to see what else I could do with it other than just consuming media.

Local VS Code in a browser
ARM64 CPU running Linux packages on an Android tablet

It started with curiosity of finding out how close to Linux I can get Android to be. Termux is an awesome terminal emulator that provides an almost desktop-like experience. I will have a separate write up on how I customized it.

Categories
Deployment Optimization Weekly

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

personal laptop: before optimisations
personal laptop: after optimisations

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?

Categories
Learning Optimization Weekly

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.

Categories
Development Optimization

Landing Page

Even though there are exams and what not, a geek can still eek out a little bit of time here and there for passion projects. It used to be blogger hosting all of my blog posts but ever since switching over to WordPress, I now have a “free” domain waiting to be used.

www.lordofgeeks.com

I finally created a portfolio site for myself, even though I’m not quite sure what to put on it yet. In fact, most of it is still work in progress but I thought it would make more sense to have this rather than a page that isn’t working at all.

Since there are only 3 pages, I wrote it entirely in HTML, hoping to convert it to some form of static NodeJS page in the future. However, I’ve employed all the new techniques I’ve recently, as well as some concepts that I’ve learnt in school.

Categories
Learning Optimization

Optimizing wordpress

When the entire WordPress multisite installation runs off a really tiny server, I have to use pretty much every single tip and trick I know in order to keep it on an acceptable performance level (while being secure).

These are the 4 techniques I used to optimize my WordPress installation.

  1. CDN (Cloudflare)
  2. Caching (WP Supercache)
  3. Jetpack
  4. AMP

If there’s anything that I missed out, please let me know and I’ll test it out.

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