by Tony Tam

Chances of landing a position in big tech

In a response to this LinkedIn post. Sometimes I think people in tech companies treat interviewing like a hazing ritual because they went through the same process, they think the next set of new hires also needs to jump through the same hoops. For junior engineering positions, each open position gets 200+ resumes, and they […]

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by Tony Tam

3 Birthdays!

My wife’s family celebrated the birthdays of 3 people, my 6 year nephew, my father in law and me! This card I received gives me such joy!

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by Tony Tam

End Of 7 Year Restaurant Investment

After 7 years, my investment in a sushi restaurant has ended with a buy out from the primary investor/owner. My best friend, chef/owner wanted to keep running the restaurant, but it no longer fit my long term investment of time and money. What I learned from this experience Running a restaurant is very difficult because […]

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by Tony Tam

At 51, Hawaii calls

We have bought a 2nd home in Hawaii! My wife and I have decided to not wait until we retire or until it’s the “perfect” time. There really isn’t the right time to make a life altering move, might as well take the step and see where things go! So far, this is best decision […]

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by Tony Tam

Computer Programming is art, don’t overplan it

I’ve argued that building software is much more of an Art than Science. The teams who follow the agile manifesto strictly over plan this artistic endevor of birthing software from nothing with T-shirt sizing, rule of thumb and or fibonacci numbers in 2 week increments of a sprint. What I’ve observed in the real world of software engineering in 20 years is that during the planning and estimation process:

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by Tony Tam

Coding At Home

Music stand for my laptop that I move around for Zoom meetings and I can stand or sit. Double monitors Art for inspiration 2 Pots of flowers to keep my happy Books to keep me learning A garden to keep me grounded

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by Tony Tam

The beauty of being older at 50

Being older feel like I have spent a long time with the people in my life consistently, spending 30 years honing my engineering craft. I have internalized more of this world and becoming a little more wiser. I have built small but tight communities around my passion areas. I look forward to learning more, playing […]

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by Tony Tam

Unknown Unknown problems

We don’t even know this problem exist. How do we know it is even needed? How do we get to a better state with these unknown unknown problems? My co-worker Michael L. wrote an internal page about how he thrives on these type of Unknown Unknowns problems. I’m reminded recently that I get a lot […]

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by Tony Tam

2021 What should be in your toolbox as an engineer

If you want to be an effective engineer in our industry, get ready be good at the following Basics 0 – This is the basic toolbox as an engineer Be proficient in your favorite IDE (Visual Studio Code seems to be the most popular right now) – my personal favorite is still VIM. git – […]

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by Tony Tam

When is it okay to quit?

Angela Duckworth : When you quit on a good day. As said on Guy Kawasaki’s podcast. Guy Kawasaki’s Remarkable People: Angela Duckworth MacArthur “genius” grant winner, researcher, and author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. https://cdn.simplecast.com/audio/5179940e-b8f5-4d80-ab1a-d23cb4bed0b0/episodes/20edc8b3-a3a0-4867-b506-603c8e607457/audio/8a452c24-ba43-46e8-8bb6-1652667262ed/default_tc.mp3?aid=rss_feed&feed=A7fI4ltj [00:45:36]

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by Tony Tam

Working in distributed teams

We are learning to work differently No daily stand-ups, just unblocking meetings – so that people with different schedules can be flexible Do short demo videos (< 3 mins) instead of meeting face to share and do them frequently – high fidelity info 1 weekly demo – realtime meeting – where we sync up where […]

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by Tony Tam

Distributed, with Matt Mullenweg: Episode 26: Jack Dorsey and Matt Mullenweg on Remote Collaboration, Finding Serendipity, and the Art of Deliberate Work

https://distributed.blog/2020/12/16/episode-26-jack-dorsey-and-remote-collaboration/ And I think I have three jobs, I think there are three reasons why the company hires me every day in my role. And the number one is to create a healthy team dynamic. That’s the interconnection between the members of the team. It’s the ‘how we work together’ it’s the purpose that aligns […]

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by Tony Tam

When engineers cared about the content and product

20 years ago, while I was the lead engineer for Yahoo News, I was asked to build a very basic feature to allow users to send news articles via a simple email link. That feature was simple: let users click on a link to send the news article with the URL, title and a brief […]

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by Tony Tam

Creating Software Is *Not* About Planning

What portion of your team’s time is spent planning vs. designing and writing and testing software? Even when you did a great job in planning, how often is your plan exactly on target? When you hit the target of what you plan after 3 months, is that plan still the right thing to solve? My […]

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by Tony Tam

The Cycle Of Creating Software

As software engineers, our job is to create useful services for other humans or other services that depend on our services. In the idealized world, we write software, deploy, and move on. In the real world, we have to think about Writing software Debugging our own software for bugs Testing it locally for the change, […]

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by Tony Tam

All Zoom’ed Out

At work, someone wanted to talk with me about answering the question of “Do people at work feel zoom fatigue?” What would be a good way to look at this question from a data perspective? I proposed the following question, now that we don’t have to commute, shouldn’t we have more time in the morning […]

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by Tony Tam

Long term investment

Investment thesis Is this business going to be stronger 10 years from now? Is this business dominant and unique in the industry? For every dollar it earns, how much of it does it keep for itself? Do you love the product?

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by Tony Tam
flower

My superpower is “troubleshooting” for engineers

My superpower in life and at work is “troubleshooting.” I’m an engineer who helps other engineers when they are stuck. This could mean very detailed technical issues that engineers run into that takes them hours to solve. They will bring that problem to me, and usually, through some questions and answers with me, we can […]

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by Tony Tam

Persuasion For Change

Asking people to change is hard. The person asking for change might be asking others to move 10 steps ahead. The people being asked to change 1) Might not be convinced 2) Think it’s too hard and unknown 3) They don’t trust the person asking them. My experience in persuasion is to first build that […]

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by Tony Tam
Golden Gate Park ferries wheel

50th – embracing my engineer’ness

On my 50th birthday, at 6:27am my father at 81 years old, sent me a happy birthday message! He has been my role model, his quiet way of being there for the family, showing and doing rather than talking, his love for me and his expectation that I should reach my potential and his beaming […]

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by Tony Tam

AntennaPod 27th Pull Request: more global and more inclusive

I love contributing to products that I use daily. One of those is the open source Android podcast player AntennaPod. For my 27th pull request: Discovery filter by country & hide discovery on first subscribe screen to the source code project I wanted to accomplish the following. Give people who are offended by certain top […]

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by Tony Tam

Contributing to Open Source

I love listening to podcasts, all 111 podcast feeds. In 2020, I wanted to go deeper and understand the podcast ecosystem. I first generated a set of RSS feeds for 12 categories and submitted to Apple’s itunes podcast directory.

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by Tony Tam

a16z Podcast: So You Want to Launch a Newsletter: Tips From Writers

https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/substack-writers-wGdX5CRs This episode, part one in a two-part series on the Creator Economy, explores the process and economics behind creating an independent newsletter. In this candid conversation, host Lauren Murrow talks with four Substack writers—an artist, a technologist, a journalist, and a clinical researcher-turned-psychedelics scholar—about how to find and foster an audience, the calculus behind going paid […]

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by Tony Tam

111 Podcasts I listen to Sept 2020

AntennaPod Subscriptions 16 Minutes News by a16z Website • Feed A Place of Care Website • Feed a16z Podcast Website • Feed ACM ByteCast Website • Feed After Hours Website • Feed Akimbo: A Podcast from Seth Godin Website • Feed All-In with Chamath, Jason, Sacks & Friedberg Website • Feed Android Developers Backstage Website […]

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by Tony Tam

Tennis: strings and tension

Recently my friends at SFBadminton.org and I have switched to tennis due to COVID-19. I play everyday for about 1 to 2 hours practicing my serves and with my new ball machine, basic hitting forehand and backhand. When the strings on my new EZONE 100 finally broke after 1 month of daily playing, I asked […]

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by Tony Tam
Tennis serves

Badminton turned Tennis player: Serving grip

During COVID-19, my attention has turned towards learning tennis. In the mornings I practice 1 to 2 hours of just serving as I try to understand the learn about the game. This morning, I was able to understand the correct grip to get the slice for the tennis ball.

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by Tony Tam

Advice: For The Person In My Life

This life is your experience, you have control over it, no one else. Meet people, students, faculty! Find your people. Be wrong often. Ask for help Worthy of your time Be Nice Shower your world with the best of you can offer.

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by Tony Tam

a16z Podcast: Podcasting and the Future of Audio

https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/podcasting-audio-trends-ecosystem-future-5OvJFfje Episode Notes This podcast (first recorded in 2019, now being rerun) — is a podcast about podcasting: But it’s really all about audio. A lot’s changed… and a lot hasn’t.  How do we define “podcasts”; how does the feeds ecosystem currently work; what content and entertainment experiments might change how people not just consume, […]

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by Tony Tam

Podcast: Rock The Boat : Boba Guys founders

The 2 founders of Boba Guys give really great advice to Asian Americans to Over Index towards being out there We need Asian Americans to be leaders Throw out more energy Speakup more, don’t worry about being too loud (just yet) Punch up and take the mike listen to episode1 and episode 2 on Rock […]

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by Tony Tam

Android Dev: Linting

In order to suppress linting warnings that do not make sense, one can use the @SuppressLint decorator.  In order to know which warning string to use, here is a quick time.  Thank you StackOverflow Tonys-MacBook-Air:tools tonytam$ pwd /Users/tonytam/Library/Android/sdk/tools Tonys-MacBook-Air:tools tonytam$ !. ./bin/lint –list | grep -i used “UnusedAttribute”: Attribute unused on older versions “UnsafeDynamicallyLoadedCode”: load […]

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by Tony Tam

Android Dev: EventBus : Publisher + Subscriber

While trying to implement a feature for AntennaPod to allow users to auto skip intros and endings in this pull request #3975, I need to be able publish the event when a preference has changed and for a previous object with state that has already read the value of the preference to refresh it’s content. […]

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by Tony Tam

v.0.1 Habits -> Rituals

– Make it your identity – Take the smallest next step – Make good habits easy – Create the environment for good habits easy and bad habits hard – Find a partner – Do it every single day

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by Tony Tam

The backhand smash in badminton

It’s been a while since the sport of badminton has seen another great backhand smash. Taufik Hidayt was the defacto backhand king. See videos on DuckduckGo search. Victor Axelsen of Denmark has been working on his backhand smashes and I believe it’s the new birth of the backhand smash. I’ve seen him use it at […]

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by Tony Tam

Software Was Never Meant To Be Free

We used to have shareware and that was how programmers could give you software for free.  When 2% of people pay for ‘free’ software, the rest of the world could get the benefits of free software. Because people don’t pay for mobile & desktop apps developers started adding very annoying ads into software causing some […]

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by Tony Tam

https://whats.new

This idea from Google is currently under limited available release.  Learn more at https://whats.new/ .new is a domain extension exclusively for performing new actions online: any act that leads to creation can have a quick and memorable .new shortcut associated with it. Help your customers take action faster. Less time clicking means more time creating.

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by Tony Tam

Staying Productive : from After Hours Podcast

Do one thing at a time, turn off notifications Saying no to almost everything, pretend if the ask is for tomorrow, would you say yes? Turn off email notifications Switch to paper Getting outside Every meeting tends to fill the time allocation, push to finish early Carving out alone time Read books to be exposed […]

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by Tony Tam

Link: NYT – It’s Time to Unfriend the Internet

About Facebook Nor does she mince words when taking on one behemoth in particular. “I hate it,” she writes. “The company is one of the biggest mistakes in modern history, a digital cesspool that, while calamitous when it fails, is at its most dangerous when it works as intended. Facebook is an ant farm of […]

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by Tony Tam

Debugging Android Auto As A Developer

In order to debug Android Auto cd ~/Library/Android/sdk ./platform-tools/adb forward tcp:5277 tcp:5277 ./extras/google/auto/desktop-head-unit On your phone/emulator, turn on debugging then in Android Auto Settings -> Start head unit server Reference: Setup for Android Autos – https://developer.android.com/training/cars/media Setup your testing environment – https://developer.android.com/training/cars/testing See Tony’s PR contribution to AntennaPod

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