https://terenceponce.com/posts/ Recent content in Posts on Terence Ponce's Website Hugo -- gohugo.io Fri, 17 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2020-04-17-im-already-sick-of-animal-crossing-after-almost-a-month/ Fri, 17 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2020-04-17-im-already-sick-of-animal-crossing-after-almost-a-month/ Almost a month ago, Animal Crossing: New Horizons was released. The timing of its release couldn’t have been more perfect. People were forced to stay indoors due to COVID-19 and with all the panic and restlessness that’s happening, there was this cute little game that’s all about chilling out and feeling good. I’ve been playing the game every chance I got since it was released, but I’m pretty sad right now because that feeling is gone. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2019-07-19-simple-but-effective-way-of-handling-state-and-business-logic-in-flutter/ Fri, 19 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2019-07-19-simple-but-effective-way-of-handling-state-and-business-logic-in-flutter/ When it comes to learning Flutter, my observation is that a lot of people get stuck when they attempt to do anything outside of the tutorials and guides. This is true for all things in software development, but I think Flutter has it worse because it happens regardless of how much experience the developer has under their belt. My guess is that it happens for the following reasons: Flutter is a framework that provides a lot of freedom to developers. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2019-07-05-consider-using-flutter-for-your-next-mobile-app/ Fri, 05 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2019-07-05-consider-using-flutter-for-your-next-mobile-app/ In this blog post, I am going to try and convince you to use Flutter instead of React Native for your next mobile app. Ever since Flutter hit version 1.0, I have been giving a lot of attention to Flutter. It has been a challenge, but it has been worth the effort so far since I was able to convince my company to make the switch from React Native. The development process has become a lot more sane since we’ve made the switch. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2018-05-30-premature-optimization-is-indeed-the-root-of-all-evil/ Wed, 30 May 2018 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2018-05-30-premature-optimization-is-indeed-the-root-of-all-evil/ This is a story of how I cycled through various technologies only to end up back where I started. I’m sure you’ve read a lot of stories about why people shouldn’t be always going for the latest and greatest technology when it comes to creating software. I did, but I realized recently that I didn’t actually learn from these stories. This whole thing started when I became part of a project that I had a stake in. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2017-02-12-the-world-building-of-john-wick-is-some-of-the-best-ive-ever-seen/ Sun, 12 Feb 2017 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2017-02-12-the-world-building-of-john-wick-is-some-of-the-best-ive-ever-seen/ I just watched John Wick: Chapter 2 a few days ago. I’ve never watched the first movie before then, but I figured it was alright to watch the second movie since most action movies don’t require a lot of knowledge of the story of either the prequels or the world to appreciate them. As expected, it didn’t really take a lot of context to watch the movie. I made a few assumptions of things that happened in the first movie to fill in the blanks. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2015-11-16-things-ive-learned-from-organizing-a-large-scale-event/ Mon, 16 Nov 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2015-11-16-things-ive-learned-from-organizing-a-large-scale-event/ DevCon Summit 2015, a 2-day developer conference that had over 1500 attendees, ended a few days ago. I was part of the organizing team which consisted of 60+ volunteers - The largest team we’ve ever had at a DevCon event. It was a really bumpy ride for everyone. Mistakes were made, and a lot of things were learned during the event. The event opened my eyes and made me appreciate how hard events productions can be. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2015-09-24-creating-signed-cookies-in-capybara/ Thu, 24 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2015-09-24-creating-signed-cookies-in-capybara/ I struggled with this for a while, but I finally got it. Backstory I have a series of Rails applications that authenticates through a single OAuth provider app. After authenticating successfully, the OAuth provider creates a multi-domain signed cookie that can be read by all of the apps, so the user will only have to authenticate once. It’s sort of a Single Sign On (SSO) solution that our team thought of a year ago. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2015-09-20-heneral-luna-not-your-usual-movie/ Sun, 20 Sep 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2015-09-20-heneral-luna-not-your-usual-movie/ Just watched Heneral Luna and it definitely lived up to the hype that it got from the people in my network. As someone who found Philippine history to be boring during school (let alone almost fails the class), I probably would have been more interested if this movie were to show during my school years instead of just now. The story telling is incredible, the pacing is just right and it had a good amount of comedy mixed in between the scenes. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2015-06-10-things-i-learned-about-switching-jobs-frequently/ Wed, 10 Jun 2015 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2015-06-10-things-i-learned-about-switching-jobs-frequently/ I entered the professional world last November 2011. I’ve been working for more than 3 years already and I’ve had 4 jobs during that time span. While it looks pretty bad and intentional on paper, everything just happened coincidentally. I lasted a few months to almost a year in the jobs that I had previously, but I just got past the 2 year mark with my current job. I felt like collecting my thoughts here and make a couple of points about what I’ve learned after all that has happened: https://terenceponce.com/posts/2014-12-17-how-to-allow-approved-mobile-applications-to-authenticate-seamlessly-inside-oauth-20/ Wed, 17 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2014-12-17-how-to-allow-approved-mobile-applications-to-authenticate-seamlessly-inside-oauth-20/ I have an existing API server built with Rails, Devise, and the Doorkeeper gem. There’s also a mobile app that wants to use the API for authentication. By default, what will happen is that the client (or mobile app in this case) is going to be redirected to the server’s sign in page and then back to the client. This kind of flow is fine if you’re in a web browser. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2014-12-10-how-to-act-professional-at-least-in-email/ Wed, 10 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2014-12-10-how-to-act-professional-at-least-in-email/ I can’t count how many times I’ve been told to act professional when it comes to writing emails at work. Despite how hard I’ve been trying, it’s really hard to separate the way I usually speak my mind in text and how I should talk when I’m writing a work-related email. This has been a problem in my career for a long time and I was only able to realize it when I started working for my current employer. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2014-10-26-i-should-probably-listen-to-my-parents-more/ Sun, 26 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2014-10-26-i-should-probably-listen-to-my-parents-more/ A few weeks ago, I applied for a variable life insurance through a friend who’s a financial agent. Well, I went through it despite my mother asking me to consult her first. She used to be an insurance agent, so she knows what’s up. I never realize how much of a mistake I was making until she pointed it out. She said I was basically screwing myself over because of my ignorance on the subject. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2012-10-05-thinking-outside-the-box/ Fri, 05 Oct 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2012-10-05-thinking-outside-the-box/ One of the hardest things to do is to think outside the box. The fact that you have to completely disregard what you’ve already thought and think of something new and different than the previous one is one of the most frustrating experiences that happen frequently in a programmer’s life. Let me tell you about something that happened to me a few weeks ago. In one of my client projects, a Twitter application, the client asked me to have the application update the existing Twitter users' information every now and then, so we would have the latest info on them. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2012-08-29-im-in-charge-of-the-philippine-ruby-users-group/ Wed, 29 Aug 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2012-08-29-im-in-charge-of-the-philippine-ruby-users-group/ It’s been a couple of days since the recent PhRUG August meetup. It was the first ever meetup that I have organized as the new boss for the Philippine Ruby Users Group. This post isn’t about bragging. I just wanted to share how my journey with Ruby has been very surreal to me. 9 months ago, I barely knew anything about Rails or Ruby. I was just some kid who recently got out of college and trying to find his way into the industry. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2012-05-07-doing-it-instead-of-talking-about-it/ Mon, 07 May 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2012-05-07-doing-it-instead-of-talking-about-it/ I was browsing Reddit today when I saw this picture from this thread: This reminded me of something that has been bothering for a long time now: Almost everyone tends to talk about what they do instead of actually doing it. This is pretty common among my college friends who are also programmers on Facebook and Twitter. It’s kind of funny because even my friends are noticing this. One of them even mentioned that the first thing people do when they want to get busy is to tell other people on Facebook and Twitter that they are and then end up getting sucked in by the Internet instead. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2012-04-24-thoughts-on-being-a-501-developer/ Tue, 24 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2012-04-24-thoughts-on-being-a-501-developer/ This is old news, but I’m unemployed at the moment. It’s kind of a big deal for other people since I look like I’m job-hopping, but the reasons are perfectly valid. Anyway, all I’ve been doing during the past few weeks are going to events, meeting people, and finding a job. During my quest in finding the perfect next job, I met the CEO of a local startup company here in the Philippines. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2012-03-02-polymorphic-associations-in-rails-32/ Fri, 02 Mar 2012 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2012-03-02-polymorphic-associations-in-rails-32/ I have recently transferred to a new job. I am now working as a Ruby on Rails developer for TwitMusic. Before I go on about promoting my new employer (which I won’t do for the sake of this article), I would like to point out that I am being trained for the position before I get involved with the production code. For the first part of my training, my employer gave me a set of problems about Ruby on Rails that I have to solve on my own. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2011-03-26-a-noobs-attempt-on-google-app-engine-using-java-and-maven-part-2/ Sat, 26 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2011-03-26-a-noobs-attempt-on-google-app-engine-using-java-and-maven-part-2/ In my last entry, I modified my Maven project so it can be deployed to Google App Engine. This time, I’m going to work on my actual application so I can finally have something to show to other people. Right now, my Spring web application works fine on Google App Engine. Let me go over the code that I have so far. I first made a bean called Manufacturer: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 package com. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2011-03-12-a-noobs-attempt-on-google-app-engine-using-java-and-maven/ Sat, 12 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2011-03-12-a-noobs-attempt-on-google-app-engine-using-java-and-maven/ Since I solved most of the problems that I encountered with Spring MVC, I decided to take it up a notch by using Google App Engine. If you haven’t heard about GAE, it’s basically a host for web applications that are built in Java or Python. Also, it’s an engine for building web applications (as you can see from the name). One of the benefits that you get from GAE is that your web application gets to be hosted by the same servers that power Google. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2011-03-11-bad-start-with-spring-part-2-resolved/ Fri, 11 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2011-03-11-bad-start-with-spring-part-2-resolved/ Last time, I was kind of frustrated as well as lazy about my problem. As a recap, I had a problem with manually injecting beans in Spring 3.0 because I tried doing it the old fashioned way. After a long time of reading and thinking, I realized that I’m having problems because I didn’t embrace the sudden transition I had with annotations. Since I’m the kind of person who embraces change, I decided to stop whining and use the auto wiring feature instead. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2011-03-07-bad-start-with-spring-part-2/ Mon, 07 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2011-03-07-bad-start-with-spring-part-2/ Recently, I realized that Spring 2.5 was really old already. I was even called out for it: Terence why do you start with Spring 2.5 now when Spring 3 is already over a year old? – Sean Patrick Floyd Feb 24 at 10:50 The quote came from a comment in my question on StackOverflow. Anyway, I decided to try and use Spring 3.0 because of that. One of the new things that I encountered was the way Spring 3. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2011-03-06-bad-start-with-spring-resolved/ Sun, 06 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2011-03-06-bad-start-with-spring-resolved/ In my previous entry, I started to learn how to do simple CRUD operations using Spring-MVC’s JDBC feature. Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out to be as simple as I thought. So my problem was with this unit test that was failing because it returns an empty result set: 1 2 3 4 5 public void testGetCompany() { Company company = companyDao.getCompany(1); assertEquals("Benjo", company.getName()); } This is getCompany()’s logic: https://terenceponce.com/posts/2011-03-01-bad-start-with-spring/ Tue, 01 Mar 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2011-03-01-bad-start-with-spring/ Recently, one of my good friends asked me to make a simple web application for them. Since I’ve been wanting to learn Spring for quite some time now, I decided to take on his request because I’m such a good person. Just kidding, I really just wanted to have an excuse to learn Spring. After a few minutes of Google searching, I came across the official tutorial for Spring MVC. I noticed that the tutorial was a bit outdated and had a few errors, but I still managed to finish the tutorial in spite of that. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2011-01-29-inheritance-in-java/ Sat, 29 Jan 2011 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2011-01-29-inheritance-in-java/ DISCLAIMER: This article is a bit hard to swallow so I’ll try to explain it to you as simple as I can. I also need to mention that there are other concepts that will also be introduced in this chapter aside from Inheritance. This is my first post for 2011, so happy new year! Anyway, as a preparation for my upcoming preliminary exam in Java, I decided to write about Inheritance in this article. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-12-12-access-modifiers-in-java/ Sun, 12 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-12-12-access-modifiers-in-java/ As I’ve said in my previous entry, classes should never be invoked like this: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 myCar.brand = "Porsche"; myCar.color = "Black"; myCar.name = "911 GT3"; myCar.speed = 120; myCar.gear = 2; System.out.println("myCar is a " + myCar.color + " " + myCar.brand + " " + myCar.name + "."); System.out.println("myCar is running on " + myCar.speed " miles per hour on just gear " + myCar. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-12-15-code-refactoring/ Sun, 12 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-12-15-code-refactoring/ In the real world, you’re not a one-man team like you once were during college (because apparently, it’s cheating in your professor’s eyes). You will work with other people when developing software. If that’s the case, it’s inevitable that those other people you’re working with will also be looking at your code. Not only that, they’ll also be working with the code that you will write. One of the things a developer must strive for is better code. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-12-04-classes-and-objects-in-java/ Sat, 04 Dec 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-12-04-classes-and-objects-in-java/ DISCLAIMER: Do not use any of the code found in this entry for real life exercises. They do not adhere to the standards of OOP. I intentionally wrote wrong code in this entry for the sake of discussion. I will smack you in the face if you used the following code in real life exercises. I’ve been trying to teach some of my classmates about the concepts of OOP, so I thought I’d turn them into a series blog posts for future reference. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-11-25-regular-expressions-in-java/ Thu, 25 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-11-25-regular-expressions-in-java/ This semester, I have a class in Java, specifically, Java EE. It’s about time I have another programming class. It’s been 2 years already since my last class in Java. So anyway, for our first exercise, the professor asked us to make a basic Java application. The requirement for the application is to use classes and packages. The classes should have private attributes, public methods, getter and setter methods. I figured I should try using regular expressions since one of the class attributes’ setter method seems to be screaming for one. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-11-03-introspection-in-python/ Wed, 03 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-11-03-introspection-in-python/ I just finished reading a chapter about Introspection in the book that I’m reading. Learning the concept of introspection and doing it in Python is the trickiest challenge I’ve come across so far. Introspection, by definition, is determining and manipulating objects at runtime. The idea is that we know that there are objects that will definitely come across our program during run-time. We don’t know what they are exactly, but we want to do something about them in case our program encounters them. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-11-02-python-and-its-weird-boolean-logic/ Tue, 02 Nov 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-11-02-python-and-its-weird-boolean-logic/ I found some pretty interesting keywords in Python: and and or. Coming from a C background, this is somehow new to me since I’m used to using symbolic operators for boolean logic (&& and ||). One of the things I noticed was how Python interprets these keywords: 1 'a' and 'b' It returns ‘b’. Surprised? I know I am. One look and I immediately thought it would return something similar to True since both values aren’t null. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-11-01-python-and-its-different-way-of-type-casting/ Mon, 01 Nov 2010 12:00:10 +0800 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-11-01-python-and-its-different-way-of-type-casting/ I tried to make a Fibonacci program in Python to experiment with getting user input, displaying output and type casting. This was the code that I came up with at first: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 def fib(n): print 'n =', n if n > 1: return fib(n - 1) + fib(n - 2) else: print 'end of the line' return 1 n = raw_input('Input number: ') int(n) fib(n) When I tried running the program in the CLI, I have been successful in getting the user input. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-11-01-optional-arguments-a-gift-from-heaven/ Mon, 01 Nov 2010 10:00:10 +0800 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-11-01-optional-arguments-a-gift-from-heaven/ I’ve been messing around with functions in Python. One neat feature that I came across are optional arguments. Here’s some code that I’ve written to explain more about optional arguments: 1 2 3 4 5 def foo(length, bar = 5, foobar = 10): """A sample function demonstrating optional arguments. Takes 3 integer objects as its arguments""" print "Length is %d\nBar is %d\nFoobar is %d\n" % (length, bar, foobar) As with any other language out there, you can set default values for certain arguments in case they aren’t mentioned in a function call. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-11-01-the-shortest-hello-world-ever/ Mon, 01 Nov 2010 08:00:10 +0800 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-11-01-the-shortest-hello-world-ever/ I decided to start learning Python recently. I figured I should try learning something new outside the C-family of languages (C, C++, Java, C#, etc) just for kicks. Python seems like the perfect language to make that transition that I want since it is somewhere between C and non-C in terms of syntax. Since I have no idea how to start learning Python, I decided to ask a question on Programmers on Stack Exchange, which is a Q&A site that I visit most of the time. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-09-26-it-all-makes-sense-now/ Sun, 26 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-09-26-it-all-makes-sense-now/ I hate high school. When I was still in high school, I was always included in the list of students who got the lowest mark in almost every class that I have. I’m not saying it’s because I’m stupid. Well, maybe that reason applies to some of my classes but the main reason why I always get low grades is because I hate all most of my classes. I have a strong belief that a class should be fun first before the student will learn. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-09-13-dont-worry-youll-get-there-eventually/ Mon, 13 Sep 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-09-13-dont-worry-youll-get-there-eventually/ The other day, I came across this thread on a forum that I’m lurking on. It reminded me of how I was literally asking the same question a few years ago. I’ve only been programming for a while (3 years isn’t considered long is it?). When I was still starting out, I have never been able to grasp programming for the first few months. Most of the time, I was even copying my classmate’s code just so I could have something to submit to my professor. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-08-24-the-more-you-know-the-less-smart-youll-think-you-are/ Tue, 24 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-08-24-the-more-you-know-the-less-smart-youll-think-you-are/ A few months ago, I had a talk with my mentor. I mentioned to him how hard it is for me to learn the advanced stuff in programming. What he said made an impression on me: “Isn’t that good? Everyday, we realize that there’s still a lot of things we don’t know and we need to learn. It’s exciting!”. When he said that, I asked myself how he can be that modest even though I know that he already knows a lot when it comes to programming. https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-08-01-why-mentors-are-important/ Sun, 01 Aug 2010 00:00:00 +0000 https://terenceponce.com/posts/2010-08-01-why-mentors-are-important/ If you’re enthusiastic when it comes to programming, you’ve probably taught yourself several programming languages, concepts and principles. You’re probably reading a book about programming right now. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing since exploring is a great habit when it comes to programming. I’m pretty sure no programmer will ever leave this stage in their programming endeavor since programming is a never-ending learning process. Let’s say you want to learn how to program in C++.