Dennis Seah

Photo by Candid Shots on  Pexels.com I was in a Hackathon this week and we were pulling data related to statistics on deaths due to police actions in the  United States . The information is available is at  fatalencounters.org , and visualization is created with  D3.js  map and  chartjs . All the code can be found in  github . First we look at the number of deaths in different states over the last 20 years. Death count by States California’s number is high because of she has the highest population. The next map shows the per capita (1 per 100,000 people). Death Counts per 100, 100 people Surprisingly, the number of deaths in Alaska is high. You can find a lot of information online. Next, we look at the death counts by age, the chart below is a section of the age chart where 17 to 55 years old is the age range to look out for. Death Counts by Age Males are the generally affected as you can see in the chart below. Death Counts by Gender The ne

yet another software engineer’s point of view … Photo by Pixabay on  Pexels.com Would you be hired as software engineer working in FAANG (Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, or Google) if you do not have a university degree? Can you be a successful software engineer without a degree? Is it worth spending time and money (especially in United States) to get a degree? My answers to the above questions are Yes , Yes , IDK . Someone can start programming at the age of 7-8 years old , take online courses, and watch online tutorial. The person can be good at programming after 5-6 years of learning and practice. I think the person’s interest in programming and problem solving play a big role in making him/her a good programmer. These days, it is easier to be a self-taught programmer because there are abundant of materials online. We just need a laptop and internet connection to learn. Many software companies are hiring and there is a shortage of programmers. In order to attract good ones to jo

  Photo by Pixabay on  Pexels.com Continuous learning and up-skilling are important to us as individuals, to our employers, and to our countries. So, what have we learned this week? Do we have someone to accelerate our learning process? Do we have learning/training plans? Or are we buried with too many activities and do not have time and energy to learn? We learned a lot when we were in school because we were students and our main objectives were to learn and get good grades. Many of us went extra miles to read and educate ourselves to outperform our peers academically. There were academic systems to guide us; and teachers, tutors, and instructors to assist us. However, once we were done with schools, we were left to our own devices to learn. We may be lucky to get a good mentor at work; or a good boss to push us to learn. The bottom-line is whether we have the aspiration, discipline and motivation to continue to learn. I feel that the initial for learning is not easy for many peopl

Photo by Stephan Seeber on  Pexels.com   The great philosopher of science, Sir Karl Popper said that all problems are either like clock or clouds . The former can the taken apart and its sub problems can be addressed independently. The latter is more complicated, dynamic; and their sub parts are inter-related and inter-locked. We need solutions for clouds problem as a whole and not solely for its parts. In the field of computer science, many problems are clock based, we are trained to break complex problems apart, model them and find good algorithms and/or heuristics to get solutions. However, cloudification may be an emergent one because a cloud solution usually contains many different subcomponents and they are inter-related. Any changes in one of these components affect the other ones. Hosting solutions in the cloud (not the clouds that Sir Popper was referring to) may be an emergent problem; and cloud vendors are providing tools to alleviate the situations. In this article, we