Archive for the ‘Learning’ Category
My 1st lesson – Altitude
Second Prize Medal
The picture is the medal that I got for the Second Prize in Ho Chi Minh city Mathematics Olympiad. It has always been in my desk since that time. Not because it is the greatest thing I have ever done. It is there to remind me of one of the biggest failure in my life. It is there to remind me what I did and felt when I was in 11th grade.
My feet were off the ground
The second highest winner in the Southern Mathematics Olympiad turned out to be a bad motivation for me. It killed my love with maths. It made me feel that I am too special. It made me overestimate myself. I believed that I couldn’t fail. That was a big mistake.
I didn’t prepare well enough and didn’t try hard enough on the next city contest. The result is: I couldn’t step into the next round. My friends and family wouldn’t know what happened. But I knew what was wrong. I put myself off the ground!
This failure led to the next big failure.
Depression
Now, imagine that everybody is looking at you; the next second, nobody gives you a shit. That was what happened to me. I felt totally useless and lose my orientation. I did not know what to do next, if I should continue studying maths or focusing on other subjects to pass the university entrance exam. I did not know what to do when losing all the attentions people gave to me. I was thirsty for that fame.
This made me lost my focus, forgot what was good for me, what I would like to do. It cost me 4 months living in jeaulous feeling with winner guys before I could realize what was meaningful to me. It was maths! Not the prize, but maths! I felt good that I recognized it early enough to be back on the right track and focus on what I love.
Both of them gave me a difficult time, and always kept reminding me of what is my true value, what I should aim for.
The purpose of this post is to try to remind me of what happened in the past. I know that people are talking a lot about me right now, but keeping my feet on the ground, being focused on my long term goal was the highest priority work.
Me in RMIT and Vietnamese Newspaper
You can read the Vietnamese version here
Many software engineers and IT professionals dream of developing a ‘killer App’ for popular products like the iPhone, which will make them rich. Other people dream of one day having a book published. Not many achieve either – and even fewer do so in their early 20s. But Vo Duy Khang (formerly student 3184092), an alumnus of RMIT Vietnam’s Bachelor of Information Technology program, has hit the jackpot with success in both of these areas – and now has the makings of a successful business spanning both Vietnam and Australia. Khang graduated from RMIT Vietnam in November 2010 and travelled to Adelaide, Australia, where he is now completing a Master of Information Technology with Carnegie Mellon University, under a full scholarship. With the benefit of the scholarship, Khang has been freed up to apply his own financial resources fully to get a small business off the ground while he also continues his studies. His hard work and talent have been recognised Khang’s creativity and expertise has also been applied to a new business start-up in this field which already has five people on staff in Australia. Khang has been visiting Vietnam in the past month seeking further talent from Vietnam to join his operation. Almost all his development team to date are RMIT students or graduates. “They speak English well, and they all have a good understanding of what is needed,” Khang says. According to Khang, the basis of a good user experience of any iPhone or iPad App is good performance. There is enormous potential in helping social networking applications such as Facebook to provide a better user experience by moving data in a quicker and smarter way over the net. Apress has been impressed by his thinking in this area, as shown on his own website and as shared amongst the online community overseas. One of Khang’s mentors has been Barend Scholtus, Academic Services Manager for the Bachelor of IT program, and the two continue to discuss shared interests regularly. “We hope – in fact we are pretty sure – that Khang’s learning experiences at RMIT Vietnam have made contributions to his achievements to date, and we hope the best is yet to come.”
 Khang (sitting) sharing knowledge with friends in Barcamp 2011
Khang’s book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Apps-Performance-Optimization-Professional-Apress/dp/1430237171/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1321662306&sr=8-1 Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/vodkhang
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iTunes U – a great learning hub
Stanford in iTunesU
It would be so surprised for me that very few people ever knew about iTunes U. Come on, what’s wrong here? It is a great place for you to study through Harvard, Yale, MIT, Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. And all courses are free. Many people dream about these universities, so I think it is worth my efforts giving an advertisement and some introduction.
1/ Open iTunes and choose iTunesU
Select iTunesU
2/ Select the university you want to learn
iTunesU
3/ iTunesU has a lot of cool universities: Harvard, MIT, Stanford, CMU
iTunesU Schools
4/ Courses at Yale
iTunesU Yale
5/ Download the video you like
Yale - Game Theory
iOS Readability Parser
Hearie - News Aloud
I have just released part of my source code in the Hearie project to be open source, this project will do the html readability parsing by objective-C. It still has some issues over threading, performance and may not work with all sites.
Feel free to use it and contact me if you have any issues
Hearie gets rid of distractions in webpages. Also, a high quality voice reads the content for you.
How many times have you complained your iPhone screen is too small to read? Hearie removes all useless contents including advertisments, links and more. Open your Safari, go to New York Times, tap our button and enjoy.
Hearie reads the content for you with human voice. Free your hands and eyes. Plug in your earphones and hear the content.
2nd professional year
Success is moving from failure to failure
So, today is the end day of my second year of professional working. As normal, I take a look back my career and see how it is going, what has happened over the last year and if it is going well with my old plan here.
What did I do?
I planned to learn more and work more in the technology, gain skills in Artificial Intelligence, Web and Mobile development. Almost all of them fail. All reasons started from this CMU scholarship admission that brought me back to Australia.
It was a huge chance, a chance that I had been dreaming for. It was not just the excellent environment of CMU, it was not just the reputation of this university, it was a chance for my own business. Coming back to a good market, having chance to work with smart people and starting inside a uni was a good chance.
So, I spent my time here studying finance, economics and entrepreneurship. I also spent most of time building up and trying different things, from outsourcing, writing book to product development. Lots of lessons, lots of new things and lots of failures as well. I again, grew up much faster than I ever did, just as the first time I went oversea to Melbourne. A lot of pains, but also a lot of gains.
What did I learn?
Well, I learnt something more about finance, economics and accounting. That helped me to solid my money management skills a little bit. It is better not to be fooled by those financial and business guys 
). I learnt from both the theory inside CMU and both from the work. And I sometimes had to pay more for the real life to learn.
I also learnt about sales, marketing and investment for both Android and iPhone apps. Go over 2 markets, learn different techniques, become a salesman and a customer support sometimes, all are painful when all look like a new job for a geek.
Management is also something I learnt more from real life than some boring courses in CMU. Painful and stressful sometimes, but I got lessons out of it, adjust more for the real life and moving forward.
Working deeper in some iphone and android project. I also gained and solid my iPhone skills after writing the book about it. Starting to learn android development. That’s all for my technical skills this year.
What will I do for this coming up year?
I now look for more chances to grow rather than just outsourcing and earning money. I am now working on a new and innovative project called Hearie (that I will write about it soon). I still need to figure out a good market for it but I still love doing it and it is moving ahead. That’s good.
A good fact is: failure always hurt, sometimes it damn hurts, but I learnt from it well.
What’s the biggest lesson I learned so far this year?
Biggest lesson this year
My learning progress this year has been increasing so fast, many things change in my life for the last 3 months. I changed to new living environment, new learning environment and start up my business when I came here. There are lots of lessons that I learnt as a manager in my new startup and a student in CMU. I think the 2 biggest lessons I have learnt so far this year are: planning and time-management.
Plan and Vision
Let me tell about my story first. My plan has been changing every month since the last November. The event that I went to CMU has changed my plan for my master degree and my career. You can read over my past plan here. I had a plan to work hard and plan for the master degree 2 years later. Then that plan changed. Next, I plan to study hard in CMU. Then, chances came and plan changed.
The main point that I want to get is my visionary. My vision and objectives over all of the plans do not change. I want to become an entrepreneur and build something that can change the world, something innovative in terms of technology and business. Planning is a tool for me to set up my vision, to see what will happen for me and other trends and I am more than willing to change any plan when necessary.
I have learnt significant lessons over financial planning in my CMU, which will help me over my company growth a lot. I think that this is what I lack from my undergraduate career. Money. Financial. These are important for any business technology people. I believe if you want to be successful, you have to understand about 3: Money, People and Technology.
Time-Management
The last few months, I ran in a crazy way, not like ever before. Look, everybody, who knows me, will know how fast I learn, implement new ideas and improve myself. However, I never see I learn and work at that crazy speed before. Lots of things got done, lots of breaking news. And I am still looking for more.
There are a couple of issues and lessons I learn from that fast moving. Time-management. I got a few problems at the first time when I have too many things to do than the time I can have. Then, I try different approach to optimize my time, calendar, todo list and time saving strategy. I now work much more efficiently than months ago and can really focus on a thing that I do. That’s why I love moving fast. Only by moving fast, you can learn really fast.
Again, what I want to say is you have to focus, and have a good timing management skills to control your time. Time cannot be bought!
Robocode New Beta Release
Robocode Logo
Robocode has released a beta version for 1.7.3.0, I am happy to contribute 1 feature and 1 bug fix in this release. Please download, test it and tell us any bugs you found
Reference:
Remote working and management
Working as a freelancer, I have to deal with many remote works, including working remotely with my customer, my colleagues and my employees and it certainly has some different difficulties from other sitting together jobs. Here are lessons that I have been learning from these jobs:
Communication
Our good tool for communication is skype, IM and teamviewer. We try to keep a good and frequent communication with clients before our approach is too far from what they expect, or in case they want to change their requirement frequently.
As other oursourcing jobs, it is normal that we have to wake up early or sleep lately to match clients’ time as well as developers’time. Communication requires lots of patient and understanding from both sides. Many clients told me that they never meet a software developer like me, who can sit down, listen and talk with them about what they need, how to improve their app’s qualities. I am happy with this commendation. Sometimes, I even do not need to ask for bonus, but they are generous to give me more bonus to reward my efforts working for them.
Trust
Remote management requires trust on your employee. I am never a fan of a strict manager. My strategy is to manage adult, not manage children; therefore, we have to trust them working hard and passionate. We try to hire best developers that we can, and they should do their jobs automatically with integrity without any strict control from managers.
People may keep asking me how I manage my employees when I am in Australia, how to prevent them from cheating me. I do understand that with a loose management like this, it is hard to ensure 100% no cheating but whenever I hire a best developer with high motivation, they will just work on it themselves. An important part of managing is to foresee, to plan over the next few months to few years strategies not to just stand behind every developer to make sure they do not cheat. Trust and integrity are important.
This reminds me the time working at MultiNC, my first job. My boss was never in office, rarely asked us where the project was going on. What we, as developers do, is to try our best to create a best application based on the strategy that we set up. We frequently brought the products to the manager and asked for feedback.
Self-motivation
Trust will relate to self-motivation. You can only motivate yourself when you know that your managers trust you and you feel happy and freedom about your work. I would not be surprised when many developers feel bad about their jobs and think that they just do low level jobs. Because managers treat them as resources, give them low level jobs and never trust them in doing their jobs best. Money is not enough to motivate people. For me, people are motivated by giving them enough money, enough challenge and enough respect to do what they love doing.
Freelancer Lessons and Strategies
freelancer jobs
As my plan in Adelaide, I want to get some job to earn money as well as keep me up to date with industry technologies. However, this turns out to be much harder than I believe when Adelaide is such a small city that does not have many IT companies here.
Then, I started my second option in my plan to looking for freelancer jobs and going to websites that offer freelancer jobs to see what I can get from there, and things are growing up fast enough and I learnt some key lessons over the my new job.
Price
Price was my first concern over deals and bid to get accepted a project. However, I can see that most of times, price is not the top priority for employers. What they care is they can have a high quality product in a short amount of time with a reasonable price. My strategy is to pick a fixed hourly rate for myself when competing and then just calculating over the number of hours I need to work and give them a general price.
I try to convince people about quality, in many terms: communication and product. I think it is true for any work with clients to try to exceed their expectations, try to understand their problems well and do exactly what solves their problems. The price can be higher but we can save time, money and make people feel safe, they would hire us. So, don’t aim for only price. Put one that is reasonable and prove clients that it is worth every penny
Outsourcing
This is always a way to cut down the business cost. People hire me because they want to look for more reasonable price with the same quality. And I can make another step to outsource them back to Vietnam developers. It cut down the price for me and the client and I can save my time to more important jobs, such as studying in my university (Supposed to be the most important one)
There are certainly more aspects about management when you have to do outsource and communication with customers when both of these are remote only. I don’t forget about technology lessons that I learnt and expect to learn and work over these freelancer works. These will be shared on the next entry.
References:
Image source: http://freelancejobfeed.blogspot.com/
Why should we join and support community?
There are always people keep asking me the same question: “Why do I actively join free community like Stackoverflow/BarcampSaigon/MobileDevCamp/My Blog/Top Coder? What is the value and the benefit?”. It is nice that people ask this question and actually think about it. And I hope that I can answer them fully with this post somehow.
1/ Fun.
It is fun. Really? Yeah, it is actually fun. Wait a little bit, why is it fun for working? I love playing game, I love to see my level going up and my mark changes everyday, I love beating the top challenging problem. It is just so fun there. If you still suspect this for somehow, I would rather ask you why you play football and play guitar in the church outside of working time. If you think this is not a good example because people don’t have headache over those things, then we take a look at some others. Do you play chess? Why do people play chess and what is the value and benefit when playing chess? If you can figure out the answer at this point of time, then we are done. It is fun, that should be it.
At this point of time, if you still don’t feel anything fun to do so, I don’t know if you should continue reading about other benefits: brand advertising, learning and contributing. If you don’t get fun out of the work, especially the overtime work, it is hard to persuade the goal just by other visible benefits. Moreover, these benefits are only long-term seeing and require lots efforts and time.
2/ Brand Advertising/Social Networking & Trust.
WordPress Sharing
Brand Advertising and Social Networking is important. When you actively join communities, you get to know more people and more people get to know about you. Nobody knows if these people turn out to be your next employer or your next friend that can help you out in the difficult situations.
I partly believe in the theory that sometimes, we should hire people that we are familiar and can trust rather than hiring some talented stranger. So, when people can see how you engage to help the community, people started to trust you. The more people know about you, the more people may trust you. And when people can trust you, they can give you the chance to work together or hire you as an employee or even work for you.
Moreover, these things are not built overnight, there is no overnight success. It may take you couple of months, or even years to write a blog and only your friends read it. It is the same with answering on stackoverflow, topcoder. It takes years for you to reach to an acceptable point that people start to recognize your name/your company’s name.
3/ Learning & Contributing.
GNU Open Source
Now, we go to the last reason. It is the last not because it is the least important reason, it may be the most important reason for many people. However, many people want to see the something visible, something that either gives them lots of money or reputation to move forward to their career first. So, I just leave them read things they want to read first.
It is so obvious. When you answer something in stackoverflow, it is either help you to solid your knowledge or help you to think deeply to debug. I really like debugging on stackoverflow, it is challenging. You have to find the bug as soon as possible, and sometimes, you don’t have debugger, you don’t even have IDE to help you. You just read over the code, verify each line of the code and try your best to guess the part that can create the bug. That’s challenging and fun, actually.
References:
http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com/2010/12/non-deterministic-problems-aka-finding.html
Image Sources:
http://stackoverflow.com/users/flair/227698.png
http://en.flossmanuals.net/floss/publish/WordPress/rsrc/WordPress/Introduction/icon_big.png
http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQj7UR1webcv1NlEzFaRpAUeudZjWyOYYAA27iiaxot4X9vdDa2