Jerry Ng - Jerry Ng

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Jerry Ng

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

3 Easy Ways To Add Version Flag in Go

One of my favorite things about Go is its distribution process using the go install command. With go install, I don’t have to deal with the trouble of setting up brew, npm, pip, or any other package manager separately like I had to with some languages. It just works

Image of a meeting room

Solving Canceled Meeting Rooms With Apps Script

Today, I arrived at work a bit earlier than usual. After grabbing my morning coffee routinely, I opened up my Google Calendar to see what meetings I had for the day. Of course, our meeting room for our recurring daily stand-up got canceled again. Whenever this happened, we ended up

How I Saved Scraped Data in an SQLite Database on GitHub

Some time back, I stumbled upon this amazing idea of Git scraping made popular by Simon Willison. It involves using GitHub Actions to scrape data and save it directly into a Git repository. Essentially, for each new set of data scraped, a new commit is created in your repository. The

All You Need To Know About CORS

I’ll never forget the first time I stumbled across a Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) error. Trying to digest terms like the Same-origin policy, preflight requests, CORS policy, and Access-Control-Allow-Origin header all at once left me with more questions than answers. Today, let’s dive into the world of CORS

How I Made a Chrome Extension To Help With Rephrasing

I decided to teach myself how to create a Chrome extension and a little bit about running LLM directly in web browsers. It was quite a fun and interesting experience, and I thought I wanted to jot down my thought process and whatever I’ve learned. Why I Made This

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 Update Python Version: The Better Way

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

My 2023 Year in Review

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

How I Made a MAS T-Bill 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

How I Built a Google Calendar Add-on for Esports Fans

I made Tournacat, an add-on that syncs upcoming Esports tournament schedules to Google Calendar. Three months later, Tournacat has over 90 users and is slowly growing. Here, I want to walk through my experience of building Tournacat using Cloudflare Worker, Hugo, and Google Apps Script. Along the way, I encountered

How and When To Use For Else in Python Loop

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 Use DuckDuckGo Bangs in Chrome

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 the Google "site:" search is. A story probably for another day. While DDG did not become my default search engine,

Soda making process

GIL in Python: 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 Ways on 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

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