Reading Time: < 1 minute Kong Kong is a cloud-native, fast, scalable, and distributed Microservice Abstraction Layer (also known as an API Gateway or API Middleware). Made available as an open-source project in 2015, its core values are high performance and extensibility. Actively maintained, Kong is widely used in production at companies ranging from startups to Global 5000 as well as

Reading Time: 2 minutes Masks are much more widely available, and much more widely accepted now, compared to the early days of shutdown, or in February when the US was not directly impacted by COVID. I recall buying masks at Chinese grocery store, also at the Aliexpress.com (a subsidiary of Alibaba that serves customers outside of China). Also friends

Reading Time: 2 minutes This IRA account was a bit unusual, as I took some meaningful losses earlier on. Then from 2017 (maybe a little bit more earlier, but I only have the balance history since Jan 3, 2017), things started to look up. In last 3.5 years, the CAGR is about 54.54%. My bigger winner during this time

Reading Time: 2 minutes Today I started to look at other 401k accounts I have and evaluate whether I need to make any adjustments. This is a continuation of my earlier post. In the past I do looked at them from time to time, but was not on a fixed schedule or anything. But I did start making some

Reading Time: 2 minutes Today I had a small scare at the CC lake. I was chatting with friends while keep an eye on Sophia the 5 year old. Serenity the 10 year old went paddle boarding with friend with their moms permission. I found out after the fact, and when I asked the moms (my wife and Serenity

Reading Time: < 1 minute First I want to make a quick announcement, I moved my website from uudaddy.com to stlplace.com/uudaddy as I decided no longer paying for the domain name uudaddy.com. Today incidentally I found people grabbed my previous domain. Back to topic, while the guard for Covid is way down in the US. Please note it’s not completely

Reading Time: < 1 minute Move some money from the two vanguard funds to the higher return funds. I usually looked at the 10 year return. I understand past return does not guarantee future success, but still…

Reading Time: 2 minutes It’s the worst times, it’s the best times. Pandemic and recession at the same time. For me the best part is spending some quality time with my wife and kids, the worst part is I have not got a haircut for over 3 months. All these will pass. For college graduates or post college graduates,

Reading Time: < 1 minute Was experimenting running scheduled job on PCF. One natural choice is PCF scheduler, which comes with the Pivotal Web Services (PAAS). Googled around and found this example on DZone. The spring batch code is here. There was a small typo in the manifest.yaml, path: build/libs/payment-processing-spring-batch-0.0.1-SNAPSHOT.jar Note the snapshot.jar file name does not match what’s specified

Reading Time: < 1 minute Tried two two tutorials on my personal GCP. hello world cloud storage (upload a file, then return a public url for download; another download link) I may delete those bucket and files later on, as hosting costs money (app engine, cloud storage). Update: I disabled the app (here is one article talking about disable /