Jerry Ng - Jerry Ng's blog

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Jerry Ng

Welcome to my personal website. Here, I write about my silly pursuits and unlikely follies.

10,000 Hours of Gaming

10,000 hours — that’s how long it takes for you to be good at something. Or at least that’s what they say. Well for me, that's how long I immersed myself in taking gaming rather seriously. At peak, this pursuit has placed me in the top

Linux terminal info

I Explored My Z Shell History. Here’s What I Found

As I was reading another interesting blog post about popular git config options, a curious thought crept into my mind: which git commands do I find myself using the most? This also eventually led me down a journey to explore my own terminal usage pattern throughout the day by using

How to Manage and Update Python Version

We’ve all been there — there comes a time when we must update our Python version to meet a different Python version yet, be it at work or when working on personal projects. Just a quick search about “update python version” and we will be bombarded with suggestions to run

New years fireworks

Breaking Down My 2023 Internet Profits

Making Internet money is kinda cool. As I wrap up 2023, I decided to jot down the various Internet revenue streams that I have made throughout the year. However, little did I anticipate the nuances involved. Ironically, I usually pride myself on being a well-organized person. But honestly, I never

A person standing and looking into his own reflection

A Look Back on 7 Years of Automating Stuff

A little bit more than 7 years into my career, I thought it would be fun to pen down a summary post about my adventure in automating various tiny aspects of my life. Most if not all of the stuff here sprouted from my own problems and itches I needed

Google Calendar

MAS TBill Calendar: Add to Google Calendar

I finally had enough of manually checking the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) T-Bill calendar from the official site. Just miss the buying window? Great! now I'll have to wait for another week or so. Sometimes life gets in the way, then you forget, then you miss again.

Creating a Spaceflight News Blog with HTMX & JSON API

The other day, I was casually browsing the web and stumbled upon the need for an API for my new little project. Instead of starting from scratch, I thought it would be great if I could find an existing API to build upon. That's when I came across

Python Exception Handling: Patterns and Best Practices

When it comes to raising exceptions and exception handling in Python, I've often found myself pondering, "Should I re-raise this exception? Or maybe I should raise it from another exception?" You see, the thing is, there are a bunch of ways to handle exceptions in Python.

Code on the screen

Build Your Own: Python PDF to Text

Recently, I found myself facing the need to convert my personal PDF files to text. While there were many existing PDF to text converters available for this task, I couldn't shake the feeling of unease about uploading my private documents to unknown servers. Who knows what could happen

Gophers cover photo taken from engineering.grab.com

Go Module Proxy at Grab

Originally published on the Grab Tech Blog. Read the original post on engineering.grab.com. At Grab, we rely heavily on a large Go monorepo for backend development, which offers benefits like code reusability and discoverability. However, as we continue to grow, managing a large monorepo brings about its own

Engineer looking at flowchart

How To Write Testable Code in Python

So, a few weeks back, I stumbled upon this awesome talk by Brandon Rhodes. I was so hooked that I couldn't resist the temptation to dive right into the example he shared and jot down my learnings. One key takeaway I've learned is the importance of

Automatically sync Esports schedules and tournaments to your Google Calendar with Tournacat

I Built a Google Calendar Add-on. Here's What I Learnt

I made Tournacat, an add-on that syncs upcoming Esports schedules of tournaments to Google Calendar. Two months later, Tournacat has garnered 4 paid users and is slowly growing. In this post, I will share my experience building Tournacat using various technologies including Cloudflare Worker, Hugo, and Google Apps Script. Along

Python For Else Construct: A Deep Dive

Can you use else in a for loop in Python? The answer is a resounding yes! I know it sounds crazy. The use of else after for and while loops in Python is not a widely known idiom. The use of the for-else construct is often misunderstood and overlooked. For

Searching for keywords on Google

How to Google With a Bang!

I hopped on the DuckDuckGo (DDG) hype train some years ago. It lasted for about 5 months. Unfortunately, I can’t help to be constantly reminded how good Google site search is. A story probably for another day. While DDG did not become my default search engine, there’s one

Soda making process

Python GIL: Explained Like I'm Five

So, you have heard of the Global Interpreter Lock, or GIL for short? What exactly is GIL? Well, in short GIL is a mechanism that is built into the CPython interpreter. It is designed to prevent multiple native threads from executing Python bytecodes at once. “Blah-blah-blah, stop trying to sound

Gifts with wrappers

Python Decorator: Explained in What Why When

Decorators are incredibly powerful in Python. They are useful for creating modular and reusable code. Plus, they're pretty cool once you get the hang of them! In this blog post, we'll take a look at what decorators are, why you should use them, and when you

Say Goodbye to Heroku Free Tier: Here Are 4 Alternatives

28 November 2022 was a sad day for developers. If you haven't heard, Salesforce (Heroku’s parent organization) has phased out its free tier plan on this date. For many years, Heroku has been the de facto standard platform as a service (PaaS). So many students and developers

JWT vs Cookie: Why Comparing the Two Is Misleading

There is a lot of confusion about cookies, sessions, token-based authentication, and JWT. Today, I want to clarify what people mean when they talk about “JWT vs Cookie, “Local Storage vs Cookies”, “Session vs token-based authentication”, and “Bearer token vs Cookie” once and for all. Here’s a hint — we

Terminal Emulator

4 Levels of How To Use Makefile

I love Makefile. Today, I use Makefile for most of the projects that I am working on. You may have seen Makefile in many open-source projects on GitHub (e.g. this). Like me, you have probably wondered what Makefiles are and what they do. There is a bazillion of incredible

Dota 2 The International Event

Add Dota 2 Upcoming Match to Google Calendar

💡Update March 2023: Check out this Google Calendar add-on instead I rely heavily on Google Calendar to manage my rather chaotic schedule in life. Probably like you, I want to know what and when is the next Dota 2 tournament happening, especially for Major Championships and The International. I want

MacBook with an external hard disk as backup

Backing Up Ghost Blog in 5 Steps

I’ve been writing on my self-hosted Ghost blog for some time now. In case you’re wondering, this site is hosted on a Digital Ocean Droplet. For the most part, I felt like I was doing something inconsequential that only meant much to me. Today, the site has grown

Shipping containers at shipping port

I Export PostgreSQL Queries to Google Sheets For Free. Here’s How

A couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have known that connecting a PostgreSQL database to Google Sheets could be this expensive. Despite being a trivial problem, existing market solutions such as Zapier, KPIBees, etc. require us to pay a premium for it. TL;DR: How to export PostgreSQL queries

Semantic git commits

Cloudflare Worker

How I Set Up CI/CD Pipeline for Cloudflare Worker

Today, most of my projects on GitHub are kept up to date with Renovate. With auto-merging enabled, I want to have enough confidence that the automated dependencies update would not cause any regressions. Testing Cloudflare Worker is a bit out of whack. Don’t get me wrong, I love Cloudflare

Train on a Railway

Saying Goodbye to Heroku Postgres for Now

A little less than a year ago, I built Burplist, a free search engine for craft beer in Singapore. Intending to keep my infrastructure cost as low as possible, I started with Heroku Postgres free tier. With a row limit of 10,000 and a storage capacity of 1 GB,

Wall-E holding a potted plant

12 Tips to Self-host Renovate Bot

Updating dependencies is boring. Despite its importance, we always find excuses to avoid updating them in the phrase of “if it ain't broke, don't fix it” or “there are more important features to work on”. Over time, the maintainability of the projects deteriorates. The team ends

Hosted on Digital Ocean.