Test Driven Development with Alexa SDK

Quick guide to building and unit testing an Alexa Skill

What is Test Driven Development? # According to Wikipedia, it means “Requirements are turned into very specific test cases, then the software is improved to pass the new tests, only.” Basically, you would first have to write the test of the software/feature you are developing before you start working on the developing the software/feature itself. Here are a few more articles on the benefits and why you should apply TDD: Test Driven Development by Jan Olbrich Isn’t TDD twice the work? Why should you care? by Navdeep Singh Preparation # Here are a few thing you might want to have set up or installed before getting started: ...

October 29, 2018

How to host multiple domain names and projects on one server

NGINX is one magical tool

I own multiple domain names, and each one hosts a different side project. For the longest time, everything that required ‘hosting’ was hosted on Heroku. But their free tier can be quite limited, it can also get costly quickly if you are paying for each separate project. So instead, I decided to explore putting all of them together using NGINX (recommended to me by Jane Manchun Wong). Required Resources # Virtual Private Server (VPS) # You’ll need a virtual server such as DigitalOcean or EC2 by AWS. Personally I uses Vultr (here’s the non-referral link) which costs me about $2.50 / month. ...

August 29, 2018

Hosting your own Git server with Gitea

Having additional backups are never a bad idea

Most people (including myself) host their personal projects on a third-party free Git hosting websites like GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket etc. While that is sufficient for most people, it is also pretty fun to have your own Git service hosted on your own domain name of choice. While I trust my fellow engineers at these companies, I am using this as a personally backup to those services if anything goes wrong (like GitLab. Though to their credit, they were able to recover most of it). ...

August 20, 2018

Building a side project over the weekend

Basically a solo hackathon

Few months ago during my job search, I decided that I want to add some new skills to my arsenal (resume) so I went ahead to build a bill splitting webapp (and the month before, an Alexa skill). Granted, the backend was built weeks before during a hackathon (shoutout to HackISU), I’m just focusing on building the UI that makes post requests to the backend. In the process, I also ended up fixing some inherent flaws I left behind in the backend. ...

June 2, 2018

Getting started with Travis-CI

Add that fancy badge onto your GitHub repository README

What is CI and why should I care about it? # CI stands for Continuous Integration which as the name suggests, is an integrated tests that runs continuously on every time when someone pushes a commit (or mostly when opening a Pull Request). As for why is it important, it automates the whole testing modules. Ideally, you would still want to test your changes locally before pushing them to remote but in some occasion where you forgot or the program requires a lot more resources than your current machine can handle, CI comes in very handy. That aside, if your project happen to have people wanting to contribute code, a properly written test with CI will help you in reviewing the changes and ensuring that the contribution would not break the build. ...

April 22, 2018

RESTful API with Spark Kotlin

The not-so-mainstream way of building an API

When speaking of building a backend API, the most common tools is either Spring Boot for Java or ExpressJS for JavaScript. Even for Kotlin, Spring Boot and JetBrain’s own ktor is the usual option to go with. But today I’ll explore into the less popular option of spark-kotlin. Disclaimer : I am not in anyway affiliated nor do I work at the project. I just simply stumbled upon it and started using it when working on a side project. (coming soon™) ...

March 21, 2018

Being lucky

Getting an engineering job as an international student

Ah, you’ve graduated. Now what? Oh right, still no job offer! *panics* As an international student, I have come across hundreds of guides on “how to land an interview”, “how to get a job”, “how to solve DSA questions” etc but almost none of them were specifically written with an international student in mind. I’m not here to dismiss the quality of such guides but rather, to be an add-on (or plugin if you will), to help international students understand their challenges better. ...

February 10, 2018

I could become you tomorrow and no one will know

because I have your IC number, your house address and phone number.

Backstory # I lied, but maybe someone else could. If you didn’t know already, Malaysia just suffered possibly its largest data breach ever with personal data of millions of Malaysians (including your full name, IC number, phone number and home address) up for grabs as long as the price is right. If you are not freaked out yet, you should be and I’ll tell you why. I don’t think many people understand how dangerous these data can be. I’m also honestly mildly infuriated about this. No, not about the creator of sayakenahack.com (hereafter referred as Keith) but rather how this whole thing panned out. I’ve mentioned before in private conversations with friends about my concerns on cybersecurity in Malaysia but never really gave it too much thoughts. Not until I discovered this whole fiasco. ...

November 20, 2017

Use Terminal in Windows with Style

Windows [Linux Shell (Powerline + Hyper)]

When the Linux Shell in Windows was first released, I used it and didn’t quite like it. Fast forward a year later, I heard it is a lot better now (also the fact that my familiarity with terminal commands improved helped) so I decided to give it another try. It is a really fun experience so far. In case you haven’t install the Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), follow this step-by-step guide by Microsoft to get started. Then, install Hyper for Windows from here. If you didn’t already, you will also need node.js for the package management for plugins of Hyper. ...

August 15, 2017