3 Steps to Monitor Your Competitor's Marketing Campaign
"The weakness of an enemy forms part of your own strength."
Growing up
Because I want to build a company that someone like myself will be proud and happy to work. This is the dull reason I give when people ask why I started a business. I like the people that I work with, and it is nice to age together with them.
From code to production with Kubernetes via Gitlab
Warning: This is a technical post. We decided to adopt Kubernetes as the company doubles down on container-based deployment. I am probably the last code-savvy person in the company to understand Kubernetes since we migrated our deployments to Kubernetes. Given that I have some code to deploy, I spent three
What has Kubernetes got to do with being a product manager?
> Warning, this is a technical post. I have been busy in the past two days picking up Kubernetes and boy this new technology will need a third day for me to wrap my head around it. That said, this has been a productive year for me. In the past
Do you hear that drum that just will not stop beating?
Ba-boom, ba-boom. A relentless beat in life to remind you to tone the fuck down. I hear it constantly, and I find it impossible to get it to stop. Against my will, my body grooves with the beat with heart palpitations in feverish sweats. I notice that I fall ill
Scraping E-Commerce Sites
As retailers shift away from traditional brick and mortar stores towards e-commerce, there is no questioning the importance of data. Flash sales such as 10.10 and 11.11 have been gaining traction over the years, spurring consumers to buy, buy, buy. In this [https://nubela.co/blog/the-data-behind-11-11-sales/] previous
Mistakes I made in my 20s
I had to study hard and get to a university because my mother said so. I had to tuck in my clothes in school because those were the school rules. Never do drugs, because I will get addicted after the first try. But cigarettes and alcohol are okay. > Cover
TechInAsia b̶u̶l̶l̶i̶e̶d̶ told a redditor to delete his Reddit a̶c̶c̶o̶u̶n̶t̶ comment
I received a private message on Reddit today by a guy who asked if I know anything about another redditor that I replied to on Reddit. I do not recall the Redditor's username, but he created https://free-tia.now.sh. His laughably simple yet genius tool that allows
The story of stupidity and Ubersnap
You might have come across this "GIF" printing photo booth if you have attended corporate events or weddings. The chances are that you just used Ubersnap's services. Ubersnap is probably the first company in the world to come up with the idea of printing GIFs. Today,
Building a product is not the same as playing a chess
Building a product is not the same as playing chess. An egomaniac tried to impress upon me that I should be like him, to engage my brain before diving headfirst into building my next business. He is not worth talking about. Instead, I will like to propose my stance on
Embrace chaos
The Singapore government just banned e-scooters on all footpaths. This stacks on top of the existing e-scooter road ban. The regulation was announced and enforced the very next day. In one fell scoop, e-scooters are banned while the nation pitches a society with fewer cars. I wish the e-scooter ban
dataextraction
The Data Behind 11.11 Sales
What was once marketed as a treat-yourself single’s day has now evolved into what many are calling the ‘retail olympics’. In November 2018, Alibaba raked in an astounding $30.8 billion in sales during the 24-hour shopping event. The billion-dollar mark was surpassed in the first 1 minute and
Warning, this post is an incredibly entitled rant
Last night, I caught a fever from a mild store throat, so I went to bed an hour earlier. Last month I caught a cold as well, so I took a flu shot right after I got better. I suspect these physical ailments are ramifications of what is happening in
Many months later, I still suck at writing
A few weeks ago, I spent $150 on 50 Pure Red Line (PRL) shrimps. These are the purest breed of what is a high-end shrimp for my aquarium hobby. They all died except one. Today I bought more. Two more high-end ones known as Wine Red Shrimps. I spend every
dataextraction
Web Scraping for Non-Programmers
Here are some web scraping options for non- programmers
Introducing SharedHere.com
I have been writing code, designing interfaces, and exploring Unix tools in the last two and a half weeks. I should not be coding. And yet I got my hands dirty because it is the most efficient way that I can wrap my head around the product as a programmer,
This time, failure is not that scary
In one of my earliest articles, I wrote about building a position of continuous survival [https://nubela.co/blog/the-bootstrappers-hierarchy-of-needs/]. Looking back, building that stream of sustained revenue was more than just luck and hard work. It was an act of desperation. I worked hard because I was desperate. I
Demanding excellence
I wonder if it is a false dichotomy between demanding excellence and being liked. Being liked has it's perks and I am envious of those perks because they are rare and fleeting for me. Unfortunately, I choose excellence everytime. I have no story to frame the point I
I doomed myself to failure because I live in Singapore
Growing up as a teenager, I consumed American drama exclusively and built friendships with fellow American hackers. Inadvertently, I longed to go to the US and even live there. In my interview with NOC, my university's international internship program, I raved so much about the US, and I
I am working on a tool that I hope will knock down these walls permanently
Straits Times is going bankrupt, so they made a paywall -- Straits Times Premium. Immediately r/Singapore on Reddit built a bot to repost the blockaded content for all to enjoy. The problem is, traditional businesses do not get the internet. Hell, even teenagers do not get the internet. Let&
I was in the worst class in Anglican High - AHSEC4G
I was in the worst (performing) class in secondary school. I am not sure how well it does now, but Anglican High was a good school that ranks in the top ten. I was in the "Special" stream, as were most of my peers. Academically, our cohort sits
I screwed up my weekend project
Sometimes, I envy smokers because they always seem so relaxed while smoking. My drug of choice is programming. I am lost in my head when I am in the zone, arranging lego blocks of code both in my head and on my screen. I love coding, so naturally, I chose
This is how you can learn TypeScript in 5 minutes
Warning, technical post alert. I have been programming in the last two weeks, and boy do I miss it. We have been using a variant of CoffeeScript, known as iced-coffeescript [https://maxtaco.github.io/coffee-script/]. It is like Coffeescript, which is like Javascript, but it is also like Python with
I found a parent on the internet when I was 14
I spent a significant bit of my teenage life on the internet. I trafficked pirated content that was sold downstream by pirated DVD vendors, otherwise known as warez couriering [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warez_group#Courier_groups]. I hacked US military servers and used them to host botnets [https:
Is Web Scraping for You?
Firstly, let’s clarify. Web scraping is not the end-all-be-all. It is, however, a starting point for further value-adding applications such as price sensitivity or sentiment analysis, leads generation for a company looking to scale its sales process, etc. These feats can only be accomplished with the support of large