First post of the year and also the first post in almost seven months. Any longer and maybe the site would be forcibly shut down due to inactivity, mental note to self to check back occasionally to keep the site alive.
Internship
So what has happened in 1H19? Well, internship has came and gone, rather smoothly in fact. I was fortunate enough to end up in a nice department which gave me the opportunity to gain insight of the operation of the company from a different perspective. My assigned tasks were not overly demanding or time consuming, which allowed me to have spare time to work on my pet project(s).
Without going into too much detail, this project provides a automated digital platform connecting multiple parties and linking together various existing procedures. The advantage of this platform is all the information is easily accessible to the stakeholders involved and a significant amount of time is saved by avoiding the need to access multiple files to get the same information.
The beauty of the automation is that it essentially reduces the human effort of the existing procedure and as such, much of the human error is removed. Data analysis can also be generated based on the data captured and by integrating the other procedures, much more insight could be gained from the generated charts and tables. I was really glad to see warm and positive reaction from the users and this is in a way a validation that my cognitive capabilities are still decent and I could sufficiently think out of the box while navigating around weird obstacles.
Truth be told, I was really excited to head off to work every morning to work on the project, fixing bugs and adding more features to improve the platform. It would be almost unbelievable if day 1 me was shown the platform and told that I developed it from scratch in two months. At some point in the development, it just became addictive and the progress seemed like a game.
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Without going into too much detail, this project provides a automated digital platform connecting multiple parties and linking together various existing procedures. The advantage of this platform is all the information is easily accessible to the stakeholders involved and a significant amount of time is saved by avoiding the need to access multiple files to get the same information.
The beauty of the automation is that it essentially reduces the human effort of the existing procedure and as such, much of the human error is removed. Data analysis can also be generated based on the data captured and by integrating the other procedures, much more insight could be gained from the generated charts and tables. I was really glad to see warm and positive reaction from the users and this is in a way a validation that my cognitive capabilities are still decent and I could sufficiently think out of the box while navigating around weird obstacles.
Truth be told, I was really excited to head off to work every morning to work on the project, fixing bugs and adding more features to improve the platform. It would be almost unbelievable if day 1 me was shown the platform and told that I developed it from scratch in two months. At some point in the development, it just became addictive and the progress seemed like a game.
The challenge was to complete a new module in a day without introducing new bugs and also make it fool proof at the same time. That involved predicting what actions people might take when presented with the UI and the possible modes of failure. Towards the end, paranoid me decided to make a double layer backup system to fully regenerate the entire platform as long as one part of it still exists. Which basically means it’s indestructible and incorruptible.
A challenge I faced during the development of the project was how to extract data from the various sources which had inconsistent formatting and even incorrect data? One of the files routinely swapped the MM/DD and DD/MM which would throw off my sorting algorithm and send my module crying. This presents another selling point to transit to the centralized platform asap, which the stakeholders agreed wholeheartedly.
The solution I went with was to manually correct every single entry in the file to the standardized format, after which my code ran flawlessly. To prevent any chances of corrupting the data in the future, I briefed the team on the issue and advised them to allow me to integrate their file into the platform and reap the benefits which everyone else is enjoying. Unfortunately, I did not hear back from them before the end of my internship.
Such exciting times we live in. A few years back, electric airplanes were kind of a bad joke but now we have a functional prototype which promises to be cost efficient. If this is scalable to commercial passenger aircrafts, perhaps one day we no longer need jet fuel for aviation. Airbus is even rumoured to be working on a hybrid jet engine to replace the A320.
Blast from the Past
The project brought back memories of the period in my past where I was really passionate about coding. Obstacles and challenges made me more driven and part of it was the desire to solve the “puzzle”. The longer it took to break, the more obsessed I became. I once dream of this as a career but it seems dreams are made to be broken by reality of this world. Nevertheless, the project revived the dream momentarily and I thoroughly enjoyed the short lived duration of it.
P.S. I seem to be getting more and more incoherent these days…
A Bubble?
Global equity markets had a rather turbulent start with a rather large selloff in May. I recall the day at work where the market continuously dropped for the entire morning to hit a decline of 3% during market close. The rest of May basically repeated the sea of red counters. With optimistic news from the recent G20 regarding the trade war, the markets have recovered with the S&P, Dow and NASDAQ hitting record highs.
Likewise, my portfolio registered an all time high and broke past a significant milestone. This proves that my investing strategy is sound and although it doesn’t generate crazy returns like doubling every year, I know for a fact that it is a reliable secondary source of income in this late stage of the economic cycle.
Sidenote, the major cryptocurrencies had a nice recovery, with Bitcoin breaking past the 10,000 mark in June. BTC was even trading at the 14K level before correcting downwards and dragging the altcoins with it.
This video does make some rationale arguments amidst all the FOMO surrounding cryptocurrency.
Missed opportunities. In January, I shortlisted 3 counters which I was really interested in. Diving into the reports and financials, I had my reservations and didn’t invest in the end. Well, turns out I was overly cautious and made a wrong call. All 3 stocks had >14% capital gain with positive news still pushing up the price time to time. Nevertheless, my reservations remain and I’m wondering if this is a bubble. Hopefully the house is not yet on fire but in any case, it pays well to be prepared for whatever comes next.