Oh, how fast time has flown. It was only a year and a half ago I started my time at CH. And honestly, I have to say it was the best time of my career. When I first went there, I knew exactly that was the kind of environment I wanted to be in. It also helped that I was quite a fan of the YouTube videos even before coming in.

The first few days I was there, I was always hearing people laughing probably from the video editing process or whatnot. The people I got to work with were also amazingly smart and talented! I had so much to learn from them. All I could realistically offer were food recommendations and I held on to that for dear life until Discord integration came along. And then finally when it was time to release the product I was really hired there for, it was such a great and proud milestone. It was nice to be able to contribute and be seen as equals with different qualities we all had to make the whole thing working. Everyone was professional but also knew how to have fun.

Then more and more milestones came about. The launch of mobile apps, TV apps, International versions of the site/app (for GDPR), Facebook Watch Integration a high profile project which gave us the chance to work directly with FB Developers together to have synced login and membership, and finally an updated Discord integration which I have personally prayed for to allow users to have a role/participation access change rather than being invited/kicked based on subscription status making for a more friendly experience. We have all accomplished a lot within this past year and a half but yet it just wasn’t enough at least in the eyes of our parent company.

And so, it ends this chapter where I’d have to say goodbye to a lot of people I just started getting to know when overall, just being in their presence alone felt very gratifying like a family even. And so, on to my next projects… and new goals. Hopefully, I can continue this trend and still keep relations with this family. The amount of support after this happened is tremendous and overwhelming, from fans, from friends, even when I posted about it, I realized most of the managers I’ve worked with has also commented and given their support. So it makes me hopeful that this is just another part of my journey that I can continue forward but not really leaving the people I have worked with behind…. I’m not crying… you are! *sniff*

UPDATE: I’ve also created a site directory to help recruiters get in touch with all this talent.
http://hireacollegehumorer.com/

So much has happened since my last post.  I found a job! YAY! And it’s been one of the best experiences I’ve had so far.  You may have heard of a channel called CollegeHumor (now known as CH Media).  I’m officially a Software Engineer with a focus on back-end API work.  We’ve just launched the project (Dropout.tv) I was hired to work on also which I am very proud and honored to have been involved in.  The company is great! A lot of perks, a lot of smart, friendly and creative people and there are plenty of opportunities to learn new stuff but just enough work to also allow me to leverage my experience and what I know.  So it’s kind of a “perfect” job for me.. even after having worked there for 3-4 months now, I still haven’t gotten that feeling people have when they wake up in the morning and dread going to work. Which is another good thing, at least for me… to have an actual office to walk into.  After having worked remote for the longest time, it is a really nice change of pace to have an office to go into.

There should be a lot more I can talk about but I’m tired haha and so ends my post.

A “little” late with updates but I’m working again! Found myself a contract job and have been at it for about 3 months now.  Although I’m enjoying the work, I am still looking for something more stable and have been approached on Linked In by a number of recruiters.  Guess its hiring season again! So we’ll see what comes out of those.

Also finally got the chance to play around with discord bots and have created a personal one for me to check created_on dates for accounts. I used node.js only for the sake of simplicity and there’s good reference @ https://discord.js.org.  In most cases, you’d need to be on the same server as the bot to be able to get that info, I guess because you can pull a lot more info also like last msg activity, past nicknames and such.

Hosting the personal bot on AWS also so finally I got a chance to take a look into that and set up a node.js box with a mysql db just for fun.  Hoping to do more in the future but that’s about it for now.

Aside from just programming languages, I decided to also look into the roots of my own native language, Cantonese.  I actually know what the 6 tones are now! If you already know the numbers, it’s 194056!

So I’ve been interviewing a little more and have even started a GitHub repo to keep and share my coding projects which can be found here https://github.com/JackyC313. Currently, I only really gave 2 projects in there

https://github.com/JackyC313/abletoapp – Use Laravel to create a Survey/Quiz type page which is log-in protected and can show the results in a graph format.

https://github.com/JackyC313/topviewapp – Use OOP Php to fetch and organize some JSON data and JS to display the data.

I also started converting this site to Laravel’s October CMS but what’s bugging me more and more about it is that unlike WordPress, the content and theme isn’t as separated as I’d like it to be. I kind of mentioned that in the last post but I think it’s starting to be a deal breaker for me and so I think I’ll keep this as a WP site a little longer and see what else I can do here, perhaps build different themes and some plugins to familiarize myself a little more with WP’s limitations.

So much has been happening that I don’t even have a chance to update it here fast enough. But just as a quick summary, I’ve been trying to update my skills by looking more into best interviewing practices, updating my resume, doing some practice code from 2 sites I found to be pretty neat:

https://www.freecodecamp.org
https://leetcode.com/

I’ve also looked into Laravel again as I am beginning to like the ease of use in that framework more and more. And as it so happens, there is also a CMS that’s based in Laravel, October CMS which I also looked into.  A few things I like immediately are:

• Ease of file structure navigation (in comparison to other CMS including WordPress)
• File editing can be easily done via code (files) or through their CMS interface.
• Quick to start up and get running
• Latest stable release is fairly recent 2016
• There are a lot more updates coming in the near future [“October Pond”, updating to the Laravel 5.5 framework]

Some things I dislike are:

• Some of the content is File based rather than Database based, so it’s not as easy to switch themes and expect to still see all the same content on your site (as in WordPress). [However, there are ways you can build/use the plugin system and make your content Database driven]
• Laravel 5.5 runs on PHP 7.0+ which means I’ll probably have to move from my PHP 5.x environments.

I’m considering redoing this site on that CMS and have a little more control over content, themes, and plugins but we’ll see.

So I’ve looked into converting my portfolio site to a CMS like WordPress and figured I’d finally jump in and learn how it works.  I’m not entirely convinced that it can do everything I want it to, but it’s a common enough CMS that many people use so I figured, it should do the job for now.  I’ve also been behind schedule because I’ve become an uncle! :D.  So everything’s been pretty hectic lately.

Did some assessments for job interviews and figured those might be a nice show case. Or at least have a log of this stuff so I can come back to and look at. While coding, I was thinking of doing what I had always had in mind, to start building an array of libraries which I can reuse. I never really had the foresight to always keep some code I’ve written in the past because I always thought I can go back to it easily. But once a project was done, it always stayed archived on company servers so I never thought I’d lose access to it (until I got laid off). Now that I’m starting my own repository of code (maybe even moving some of this to GITHUB someday since that’s the trend now a days).

While doing these interviews, I also tried to brush up on some of the basics.

• What is Object Orientated Programming? APIE
  • Abstract – Preserving relevant information and discarding the irrelevant.
  • Polymorphism – able to have a function/method work in a variety of different ways depending on input parameters.
  • Inheritance – ability for a class to rely on other classes (parents, extends) for some of it’s properties and methods.
  • Encapsulation – store related information (data members and methods) within an object.
• Javascript stuffs
  • Javascript uses Objects.
  • Functions are passed by value. However Object properties are passed by reference. So if object properties are changed within a function, they DO get reflected in the object itself outside that function. (JS Tests)

After a period of no activity, I’ve taken some of the work I’ve done offline and put it online. This also required some reworking some of the code I had for my portfolio so that it works the way I want to. Originally, I was just playing around with the site where I kept it free of any JS and tried to use CSS tricks but I after the period of inactivity, I figured, it’s best to use JS where ever needed so it can be easier to maintain and it’s a lot more practical.

I’ve finally decided to start up a portfolio site to catalog some of the work I do on my own time. Started by looking through a few sites for inspiration and tried to make something that fits what I think “looks good”.