Kimserey's blog

Opinions and decisions, how to be a successful team mate I have been working for more than 8 years in the software industry and have dealt with loads of developers from junior to senior.There are multiple points which can make a successful team mate. One of them is knowing when to express opinions and when to take decisions . One thing I have learnt is that decisions, forcefully agreed on, will most likely not be respected by the team. I also learnt that decisions come from opinions and the way we express opinions will dictate the level of respect team mates attributes to you and the level of trust they place in you. Just like in sport, respect and trust are the most important values to have. Today I would like to explore the different scenarios where we, as developer, should express our opinions and also when should we, as developer, take decisions. 1. Opinions Those are rules that I have followed and which have lend me into building lasting relationships with team mates. There a...

Cost of living in London In 2015, I decided to relocate from Singapore to London. At the time I had no idea about the cost of living, the places where I should rent and places where the groceries would be the cheapest. Fast forward to today, March 2017, I moved back from London to Singapore. I stayed around London for more than a year and a half and while I was there, I kept an extremely close look to every in and out from my bank account. I even created an app Expense King to track my expenses coming out from my bank account. Today I would like to share what I wish someone would have shared before I relocated, a post about cost of living in London . This post will be composed by 5 parts: 1. Situation 2. Recurring expenses 3. Rent a place 4. Bills 5. Grocery shopping 1. Situation My fiancee and I lived in a one bedroom apartment. The apartment was located at Pontoon Dock on the east of Canary Wharf with access to the DLR (but not the underground). It is about 40min by ...

Why I created Baskee? Few days ago, I released my first Android app Baskee built with Xamarin and F# . https://www.kimsereylam.com/baskee In this post, I would like to share with you the most common questions my friends asked me and I hope it will help you understand better why Baskee is useful for you! This post answers the following questions: 1. Where did the idea come from? 2. What are the problems Baskee solves? 3. Is Baskee free? 4. How many people worked on it? 5. What stack is it built on? 6. If you had one advice for new developers to start what would it be? 1. Where did the idea come from? I was walking at the supermarket and saw Nescafe coffee tin selling at 6 pounds. I am a big coffee consumer so I regularly buy coffee and I knew other days I did no pay for 6 pounds but I couldn’t remember how much I used to pay and even in which shop it was cheaper. I tried to check online but there was no network at the supermarket. So I didn’t get it and continue to shop. B...

Untrack a file previously pushed with Git Last week I had to untrack a file previously pushed on a git repository and I wasn’t sure on how to do it. Took me a while to wrap my head around the process so today I would like to share that in order to have it documented here. This post will be composed by two parts: Scenario git rm --cached git update-index --assume-unchanged 1. Scenario I have a file test already pushed in my repository. > git ls-tree -r master 100644 blob 63123fbe81571b48b7d65602f9828524f9d84b5f .gitignore 100644 blob a6712f67380bebb75d15c817820e8d2f5c97fb4c test Now I wanted to untrack the file from the repository. 2. git rm --cached If I want to remove the file from the git repository , I can do the following: > git rm --cached test > git commit -m "remove test" > git push rm is used to remove a file from the index (The index is where the staged changes are held). It would be the same as manually deleting the file and then s...

Nice features and tricks with SQLite For the past few days, I have been writing a lot of SQL queries to query SQLite databases. I had to extract data for reporting purposes from SQLite databases where simple SELECT-FROM-WHERE queries weren’t enough. From this experience, I learnt few tricks that I am sure some of you will be interested in. So today, I will list it all in this blog post. This post is composed by six parts: Use the built in date functions Cast your string to integer with CAST Transpose a table using GROUP BY , CASE and Aggregate functions Concatenate value with || Attach databases to JOIN on tables from different databases Improve the performance of your query with EXPLAIN QUERY PLAN The parts aren’t related with one another. 1. Use the built in date functions strftime is the main function for datetime manipulation. It takes a format , a string date and some modifiers . Here are the format extracted from https://www.sqlite.org/lang_datefunc.html . %...

Dealing with stress and anxiety in the Software industry Lately I’ve seen a lot of posts about burnout in the the Software industry blogs. Burnout refers to the lost of motivation, hopelessness at work or life, and lost of interest in anything. Stress and anxiety are symptoms which can lead to it. All the articles and blog posts address a real problem in the Software industry - a subject hard to discuss with others. Sharing with colleagues or managers that we are stressed or depressed brings a sentiment of weakness. In this world which promotes that only the strong survive, we traded kindness, understanding, and compassion for oppression, threat, and intimidation, thinking that they will generate better results. In industries like Banking, Fashion, Entertainment, Medical, it is well known that people experience a considerable amount of stress, anxiety and/or exhaustion. What about the Software industry, do “we” programmers experience stress, anxiety, depression? Software industr...