Technology

Here is a list of all the relevant technology set up that I use personally at work, home, and everything in between. I grouped them on different groups according to function. Nowadays, I tend to be minimalist on what I purchase both on hardware and software, and make sure that I am very intentional with their uses and not because of vanity / impulse buying. Work and Personal Devices Macbook Pro M2 Windows Desktop: 64 GB RAM, i9 CPU, and Nvidia RTX 3080 iPhone 13 mini (Personal) Samsung Galaxy S20 (Work) Apple AirPods Pro Bose Quietcomfort 35 Kindle Papewhite Desk Setup V20 Desk Xiaomi Monitor HP Monitor Dell Docking Taotronics Speaker Multiple charging Bay Webcam USB Spliter Blue Snowball Microphone Playmax Logitech Mouse Logitech Keyboard Desk Thredmill Attached Drawers Development Software Visual Studio Code (and extensions) Visual Studio 2022 (Windows) Jetbrains Rider Docker WSL Terminals: iTerm 2 and Windows Terminal Productivity Software Obsidian Outlook Calendar Mobile Apps I use daily Apple Notes, Reminders, Calendar, and Voice Memos Obsidian and Working Copy Health: Trainerize, Strava, Garmin Connect Audible, 12 Min, Kindle, and Goodreads Banking & Crypto Apps SnoreLab and SnoreGym Life

Hybrid cloud is the trend right now I see in a lot of companies and enterprises. The term hybrid has grown too in the last couple of years. It used to be just the connectivity between an on-premises data center to public clouds like AWS and Azure. This time, hybrid now also includes multi-cloud and edge computing. It’s about borderless connectivity across different topologies or deployment models happening around. Why hybrid cloud? To answer the most important question: Why hybrid cloud? The answer is really simple, not all apps and data should be on 1 public cloud. ...

In the past, I’ve been using my Macbook Pro to do all things blockchain and smart contracts development. One of the hurdles I encountered in the past is that some tooling and frameworks were not first class citizens on Windows. Majority of these tools, especially those that come with scripts and complex networking architecture (circa 2015) just works in MacOS and Linux:Ubuntu. Introduction Of course there have been a lot of improvements now in the ecosystem since then. A lot of the workflow now will just work natively on Windows or there are a lot of binding libraries or wrappers that can interop with. If you’re using Windows, there are a lot of options for virtualisation of Linux such as Virtualbox, Hyper-V, VMware Fusion, and much more. Running Linux virtual machines on cloud such as Microsoft Azure is also an option. ...

So you keep hearing or reading about “tokens”, these “cryptos”, the “blockchain bitcoins”, and so on. It’s been quite some time now that it has involved me with blockchains and cryptos that over and over, I have to explain to people (often new clients) on what are these tokens. Even until now, at almost late 2021, I still get asked about these: Is it Bitcoin? Is it Ethereum? Is it Coin X, Coin Y? What are these NFTs? This is my attempt on how I can simplify these concepts to answer most of the important questions like what are these different tokens and shed some light on some real world use cases of them. ...

The .NET framework (and the wider ecosystem) has embraced a lot of openness these past few years. Gone are the days when .NET only works on Windows. However, as the journey to “One .NET” is still unfolding, there is a lot of confusion on how we can use .NET on MacOS. There is Mono, .NET Core, .NET 5, Xamarin.Mac, Xamarin.Forms, Mac Catalyst, .NET 6, and MAUI. This blog post explains some of the core concepts across these nomenclature. ...

Introduction Blockchain is not dead. Actually, quite the contrary is happening in the past year. There are more and more interest and it’s gaining a lot more traction than before. A big portion of this growth is due to “DeFi” AKA Decentralised Finance applications. From the hyped cryptocurrencies, we are now seeing the new next wave of this transformation as we see more financial products being developed: lending, exchanges, yield farming, and pools just to name a few. It is a hot topic right now and there are a lot of demand in this space. There are also a lot of opportunities to start creating your own innovative products as part of this wave. ...

Introduction My Battle Station @ 2021 In a parallel world, I’ll be just using 1 device and 1 Operating system for all the things. However, given the nature of my work with mobile, web, blockchain, machine learning, and cloud development, I need to have multiple devices to cater things. I tried doing “Shared mouse and keyboard” in the past such as Synergy, but I decided to use a KVM switch instead. The main reason for this is context switching, so that I don’t get distracted and I have a “physical switch” to tell myself “It’s time to do…” I also intentionally placed the KVM switch near my foot, so I have to force myself to dock to press that button. ...

Introduction I’ve been spending a lot of time lately in setting up on-premises Linux Servers. There are a lot of reasons why you would like to SSH to a Linux server such as checking configuration files, copying files, or even port forwarding. Just open your MacOS terminal and the command to ssh to a Linux Server is as simple as: ssh user@host or ssh michael@192.0.0.1 However, where it gets tricky is when you need to use a proxy such as SOCKS5 in order to access that Linux server from your MacOS machine. ...

Wow! It’s been 5 years since my first Microsoft MVP award. If you don’t know what the Microsoft MVP program is, check this site . Throughout the years, I have transitioned from various categories and technology award. In particular, Windows Development (Windows 8/8.1/10/RT and XAML), to Developer Technologies (C#, .NET, Xamarin), to Azure with focus on Blockchain, PAAS (Platform as a Service), and Integrations. In those years, I’ve seen Microsoft and the MVP program changed a lot (for the better). Products have changed, a lot of new services emerged, new categories introduced, and a big push on Cloud (Azure and Microsoft 365). Open source also became a norm, and a lot of complex service offerings were simplified and subsidised into a managed service. ...