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This is a simple how-to for provisioning a VM instance on the Google Cloud Platform. This is intended for example purposes and the VM will mostly have default configuration. The VM size chosen fits into the Always Free usage tier. We’re using the gcloud CLI tool here from the Cloud SDK. Refer to quickstarts documentation to get it installed and setup. If you haven’t yet used the gcloud tool, take a few minutes to get familiar with it.

Here are some of my impressions from the ProductCamp Singapore Volume 7 event yesterday. Overall I had a good time and there seemed to be quite a few smart people around. I had several stimulating conversations that made me think of new things or see old things in new light. If anything, I would’ve liked to have more time for free-form discussion and chat after the event, as there were a couple of topics and people I didn’t get to speak with much.

This post introduces a new series of posts commenting on and summarising the RFCs that I enjoyed reading for one reason or another. I couldn’t say when it was that I first discovered RFCs, but I know one thing for sure - the core idea of describing something, usually technical, in great lucidity and opening it up for peer-review impressed me enourmosly. In fact the idea inspired me to create my own set of RFCs, which I called PRFCs, for Personal Request For Comments, the word Personal signifying that they were mostly used internally to document thoughts about solving this or that technical problem (like designing the network in our student house or figuring out how to provide redundant Wifi connection for an old town hall in East London taken over by a bunch of hackers and artists).

This post is a list of brief memories and surprises from my first visit to Taiwan. Heavy breakfast served on a plate wrapped in plastic bag. Plastic is cheaper and quicker than washing up? Take away soup packaged in a plastic bag in a paper bowl and put into another plastic bag with handles for carrying. Much plastic in use everywhere, wonder what they do with it all once its discarded.

One of the quiz exercises at the Golang meetup yesterday demonstrated probaby my favourite idiom of the language - Do not communicate by sharing memory; instead, share memory by communicating. Its nice to be reminded of this simple and powerful idea over and over again. My first direct encounter with Golang came when debugging a network service at $work. This was the first time I had to read Go code beyond the simplest of examples and to my great surprise I found it to be a fairly straightforward undertaking.