Stark from Earth @ LS @tonyfromls@qoto.org

Done with UAT, but then moving past scenario 10, I realized that I have not implemented failure handling on downstream system calls 😆

Working on this so I can wrap this coding exercise with the last bit on Swagger.

The best part of Dockerization is that you don't need to run every system's dependency one by one and instead they are brought to life in one go via docker containers.

Preparing for simulated UAT 😅.

Had to use Postman cause some response content I could not see completely inside PS terminal in Intellij with curl.

Now at some PMD failure. Resolving.

More unit tests added focusing on the business rules.Then didnt meet the 80% code coverage so adding more unit tests. This is done.

Failing checkstyle audits, doing refactors to resolve.

Refactored the new service for the coding exercise to accommodating API versioning. Also fixed broken unit tests brought about by the refactor.

New security finding by FindSecBugs because I forgot that the controller directly calls the repo and returns the entity as the endpoint response 👀. Already fixed and doing a simulated UAT.

Today I witnessed an aftermath of bullying in teens. A perfect scene where villains are born.

But the most worrisome is not the bullying aspect, it is how the community responds to it. As what I've seen this afternoon while I was buying some snacks on a sari sari store, people blame the bully victim instead of the violence brought by the bullies.

I'll observe this kid and see if how he resists to become a villain. If he succeeds, I will train this boy to fight savagely. If he becomes one with the bullies, then we lost a kid in the process.

So yes if I am not in the PMC industry, where else is that full blown war gonna come from that i saw in my dream? That is why I am thinking, it might be a war coming to my shores someday. Maybe sooner, maybe later.

I saw the face of that adversary. I don't wanna say my conclusions yet but the adversary in my dream was Asian and its ally is a strong opponent state from the Baltics.

But one thing also reminds me. That series of dreams about the future which have been proven to me to be true, the last one, it shows a grim event that is about to happen to me amidst some armed conflict in the future. I will try my best to evade that fate but I know destiny is destiny.

It will come someday and it is grim. Though the end is a victory, it is still grim for me. Let it be if I can not run from it.

Allahu Akbar!!!

Did my late light meal first cuz I'm hungry and while eating some bread I remember some stuffs on training, teaching, and R&D.

I remember the times when I entered the teaching career but for a short time. I started with grade school from grade 1 up to grade 6 and I remember the kids loving me 🥰 and when I left that school in the province, the parents were wishing me back. The school admin felt I was a loss. The one thing I left with children there, at a young age they learned how to operate an IBM PC and navigate the DOS operating system (oh yes it was an old 286 PC). The higher grade levels, I taught them batch scripting, like how to draw a Christmas tree on the screen for fun and also how to process real world stuffs.

After finishing my BS Computer Science degree, I immediately found myself under a contract with DOST as a training facilitator for employees of NEDA on web development using LAMP stack. Turns out the government with all the money flowing from people's taxes, they don't want to spend big money, they want to get away with open source stuffs because it's free and because a lot of their infrastructure was also built using Linux servers and MySQL databases. The thing that actually brought me in this training facilitator role was my OJT with DOST and I configured their firewalls on their PREGINET network (imagine, they don't have a firewall when I came for my OJT 😅). So yes, I facilitated the web development training with LAMP stack back in 2004 with NEDA under DOST contract and the training was held on an AC cooled bus. Think of it as a mobile coffee shop 😅.

Then came a one semester teaching at a technical vocational school on computers and again the students under my class were happy as I taught them skills on Linux installation, administration, security setup, and networking setup on LAN and WAN via hooking up on the internet (was still dial-up back then 😅). And because I was a Microsoft Certified Professional since 2004 (I just got reminded of it but never really carry the brand in my resume nor my professional online profiles) I also taught my students on what I did in Linux but instead of Linux , it was Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Operating System.

The last teaching in my short stint with it was a one semester work at my Alma Mater and I handled courses ranging from Assembly Language, Data Structures and Algorithms, C and C++ Programming, Object Oriented Programming in Java, Microprocessor Systems, Security, Computer Networks, and even handled an Environmental Science course when I was teaching the Computer Engineers apart from the Computer Science and Information Technology students.

Left teaching and went into an entry level software engineer role and was doing engineering and at the same time research and development (R&D) optimizing mainframe report generations by load balancing report requests without using a load balancer module. Everything was developed from scratch of course with the strict eyes of the old systems architect guy.

The next thing I found myself in the MS Computer Science program and that time was doing a lot of research work, research collaboration, got hired by DOST as a research staff (basically a scientist) working on the intersection of computer science and electrical engineering and yes, back in 2007 up to 2010 that project also involved using a machine learning library (AI was there already but have not reborn yet in the form of LLMs). The topic on that paid research work is different from the topics I been working on as a student including the research focus on Quantum Computing in preparation for my Thesis.

There was a point where I looked at the studies made by Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard (1984) on Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution and Coin Tossing, I was primarily interested on the BB84 protocol and this was something new at the University of the Philippines back then (mainly because the focus was more on P membrane computing and on Computer Vision, while Quantum Computing was not given attention) and so a visiting Computer Science professor from ADMU sat down and listened to my talk and it was about encoding information using photon and polarizing those photons eventually taking advantage of an inherent quantum mechanical phenomena that defeats the man in the middle attack without implementing any algorithm.

Such theme on R&D also came up from time to time at my career as a software engineer and I did not only help companies solve seemingly hard problems but also helped them save tons of money 😅. There was this company from Europe and has presence in PH, they were paying penalties for a specific breach in their contract with a client. It was brought about by missing a deliverable that no engineers in the company ever managed to solved. When I joined them I fixed it. It was no easy task but my knowledge from MSCS under the theoretical track (foundations and that means mathematical) made me implement a solution based from the insight on the relationship of time and space when it comes to computing, not to mention the algorithm that I invented to solve their problem on a millions of record flat file and that search is moving forward and backwards and so on.

Even outside academe and the industry, I do R&D be it a clumsy work to prove something or just being driven by curiosity and solving some problem. For one, when I was a kid, a broken walkie talkie I tampered with the antenna and made some clumsy device and that piece of walkie talkie worked even getting into the nearby police precincts' radio channels 😆. Also used that antenna on my RC toy car and it extended the distance of the controller from the RC car. Another is the primitive and crude AC to cool my room with a fraction of electricity, using a fan, a water pump, a copper tube made into a coil, a block of ice, and the understanding of the science of heat flowing to colder areas. Another is an exoskeleton I made for a cotton-tail rabbit I had with my family a long time ago to help that rabbit stabilize its movements because it was suffering from a neurological condition making it lose its balance during movement. Given that I have taken courses in chemistry, physics, and even in thermodynamics, if I will redo these stuffs, it will become much better 😎

Even when I was planning to shift career to PMC, I only gave it 5 years if it worked so that I can come back to STEM and pursue higher studies to give me more capability for R&D.

First, I have a strong passion for everything I do. Whenever I put my mind on something, I also put my heart on it.

Second, not making a grandeur of myself but I realized that I am not a single field of expertise person. I reach to other fields as long as it engages my interest and that I feel that learning from that other field will enable me to solve problems than if I not venture into it. Let's just say I am one of the few in this modern times that is considered as polymath.

Third, I listen to the whispers of destiny, I am sensitive to the calling. The passion that I feel I understand is not something driven by boredom. It is call to do something that I might not understand yet its use in the future but I must heed it.

I have this gift we call visions and I have many visions in technology that I failed to respond too. A vision about a CAD software to rival AutoCAD but my peers laughed at it. After more than a decade we now see other CAD softwares out there competing with AutoCAD. There is also this in-memory database that I proposed for my undergraduate thesis and my professional civil engineer professor handling the CS course on thesis laughed at it and said it is not possible. Now we see in-memory databases such as H2 and others. I also thought of an encrypted email long before even Edward Snowden told the world about invasion of privacy but my tech lead that time which is also a venture capitalist due to some trauma on one of his ventures, didn't trust me and so he didn't push with me with the idea of an encrypted email. Now we see encrypted emails. Also got the idea of a bomb attached to an RC plane, now we got drones with bombs in it. Also thinking of Quantum Computing but instead of exotic physics lab setups, I was thinking of adapting the existing materials that we have such as silicon based transistors on it and see now there are quantum computer prototypes utilizing this idea.

I do what I do with a purpose.

😊

Issue on mounting files inside the image. Resolving it.

To be honest, that French guy, I suspect is not an average French guy roaming the world working as a scuba diving instructor and a freelance software engineer.

When I told him about the trainings that I underwent in preparation for PMC, something triggered him and obviously his smile transformed to a blank face and distanced away. It made him uncomfortable.

My assessment is that he maybe from the "inside" and knows stuffs.

Testing the service ecosystem. I have a mock REST API implemented on WireMock. First time to use WireMock though I already heard about this back from last year when I was working for a bank but technical leadership was not leaning towards it but on a custom built mock system which I just realized is crap 😅. Why?

Because the WireMock is trivially easy to setup, just a few steps and you are up and running. The custom build mocking system from last year takes a lot of steps to set it up for each of our microservices and the way to set it up is not graceful. It never won my support.

Woke up late today.

I remember my scuba diving instructor from France for the refresher and advance course. His background is shadowy and he never told me exactly but what do I know is that my advanced scuba diving instructor is also a skydiver.

When he asked me to introduce myself he was initially excited to learn that I am a software engineer but then when he realized that I was planning a career shift towards PMC, he shook his head. He just told me there is something wrong about my plans and he never explained why.

So all in all two persons I that I have crossed paths with basically warned me about the career shift. The Turkish and the French.

Tired now, gonna continue on the coding exercise tomorrow and also wrap it up.

In terms of lowering the age for criminal liability I am all good for that because I noticed teens these days have less inhibition in expressing evil and even committing murder.

These days the minors have complete discernment of their actions but are not inhibited when it comes to criminal actions simply because it's not a secret anymore that minors don't have criminal liability in PH.

Staying up late today working on this new coding service exercise.

Nah. not gonna pursue that lady I been talking about. Turns out we are not compatible when it comes to philosophy. For her money matters. Money is the center of her universe.

On the other hand, my philosophy is Islam. Allah (SWT) is the center of my universe, everything else, even the career and my ambitions are just noise.

We are not compatible 😆

So changes in plans. Obviously not gonna pursue PMC career anymore or for that matter any profession of arms related jobs.

The pay is low compared to my engineering work and the opportunity is literally 0 for people like me. It's not that we are not qualified in skills nor knowledge but it has something to do with clearance, and security policy as well as industry job demand size.

For that matter, I will return to my original career in Engineering including my transition as an AI Engineer. The new plan is to maintain course in where we have established ourselves already. Pursue the Electrical Engineering (EE) formal education but stay away from the older traditional EE's because with the rise of AI things are changing and that the engineers that will be relevant moving forward are not the traditional EE anymore but the Computer Engineers, AI Engineers, anything where system integration is paramount and not deep specialization.

For that matter, a BSCpE fits me. After that I will get back to UP Diliman for MSEE under the specialization of Control Systems and Robotics. Will join the projects related to space tech such as microsatellite development while taking electives the four core graduate school physics courses from either MA or MS Physics. Then will proceed to PhD EEE and will specialize in maybe 3 fields, continuing control systems and robotics, microelectronics, and electromagnetics for communications and high speed circuits, while at the same time taking more electives from graduate school physics but not PhD Physics, the electives will come from MA or MS Physics and should be from condensed matter physics, quantum mechanics, and plasma physics. Outside MSEE or PhD EEE I will take a course on Nuclear Science under the DOST program.

I will pursue teaching and research under a university in Metro Manila and so I can have free access to the laboratories and do my R&D with the funding from or via the University. This is better than going solo like from my original plan. In that way establishing a company will also be much easier again compared to being solo without a university affiliation.

That means I'm going to pursue establishing companies outside the academe. The direction of the vision also changes significantly and instead of a general defense company, it will be a company focusing on AI applications both in the software / computing domain, and on the hardware / physical domain with an eye on AI and Physical AI systems development including integrating quantum engineering in relevant applications such as a quantum radar for example.

Of course on the sides, we will study theoretical physics apart from the electives that's im going to take while at MSEE and PhD EEE. I'm also interested in smart materials and meta materials which is under the field of condensed matter physics.

Let's do this!

So let's get to the topic of managers vs workers.

Some or maybe most workers will downplay their managers and this is very true in the industry of software engineering, well at least from my 20 years experience and I been guilty of this too.

We tend to see that managers just sit around and do nothing compared to the efforts that software engineers put into making a system. This is how we see the managers specially during the bumpy times.

But after me taking a professional certificate course on International Security & Risk Management made me realize that managers do important things that we software engineers fails to see.

First, top management or the executive levels has a mismatch of culture and language when it comes to interacting with workers, the managers bridge that gap.

And because of this communication and culture difference between executive and workers, there is also a gap for trust. Managers bridges this gap and without them, it would be hard for executive level to trust the workers.

Workers like the software engineers under a manager, are focused on the details of their world. The world of the executives including the bigger picture in which the company is trying move around is invisible to the workers. The managers steer the workers to align with the company strategy.

There is a lot more to say about the importance of managers, without managers, there would not be an interface between the company / organization and the workers.

One might say that nah just remove the manager and I as the worker will take over. But then that simply means the worker is replacing the manager as a manager albeit in a poor capacity 😅

Anyways some romantic talk. I met a woman from last night and I felt attracted but this person is very different from the usual ladies that I met.

Cutting the whole story short, the lady is a very successful one and indeed most guys are afraid of her simply because of her success, leadership, and inner strength. I don't feel intimidated though but I've been in my head if I should pursue this lady or not 😅💘.

Another thing is that I am not sure if she is a Muslim as her lifestyle does not show it but more of a Kafir but one highlight in her IG when I saw it, she did visit Iran in the past and she wore a traditional persian outfit for women and she covered her head even in she was in Dubai. Something for me to think about but that I saw her as more physically attractive.

Just making sure of one thing, I don't want the same cycle as my romantic past. I'm never gonna go back on that same shit again if I will have a romantic partner again, I want someone who respects and believes in Allah (SWT), and solidly knows themselves including their strength and their weakness, and knows how to apply the knowledge of politics to move around the corporate world to build their empire and not just to freeload with mine.