Originally, we had plans to travel to Italy in November, but our plans drastically changed once I realized that I couldn’t apply for a visa due to my employment pass validity. Likely, I understood it early enough to shift the gears. I was searching for a country, where I don’t need a visa and still have places from my bucket list.

It was a big question for us where to go during the long weekend. I think we visited the majority of “long weekend” types of destinations, so our bucket list for the short vacations was rather empty. Likely, it was a notable place where we haven’t been - Yogyakarta. The number one attraction is Borobudur, an enormously huge, beautiful Buddhist temple. I knew Yogyakarta is on mountainous terrain, so it should have hiking, breathtaking scenery, etc. Thus, we quickly decided to dedicate our Labor Day weekend to exploring this destination.

This summer my wife and I did two short trips to Malaysia. The first trip was in July, and it was a quick trip to Johor Bahru to test a newly opened train between Singapore and Malaysia. The second trip was to a small, local holiday destination called Desaru Coast.

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The last time I travelled to China was 10 years ago in 2013. It was a rather interesting experience, but a few things were notable to me. Firstly, the very high pollution in Beijing. It was hard to breathe! In Beijing, I started to think that a face mask isn’t such a bad idea. Secondly, the issues with communications. It was quite challenging to navigate in the city environment. Lastly, the traffic was quite overwhelming. Thus, I was keen to see the transformation in China.

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This post is about books that I read in the first quarter of 2022.

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These days it’s quite common for big enterprises whose core business isn’t IT to outsource their work to third-party providers. Here lies their main mistake - misunderstanding of competencies that are “outsourceable”. The enterprise’s managers frequently forget that any modern business is an IT business. Consequently, you have to keep core IT competencies on the company side. Otherwise, the huge dependency on a third-party provider will be created.

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Recently, a friend of mine was complaining to me that his business has reached a saturation point in Singapore, and he simply doesn’t have a space to expand his venture. I decided to conduct a small amount of research to find out if his business has exhausted all available growth points.

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This post is about books that I read in the first quarter of 2022.

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Last year I managed to pass three professional certifications: “AWS Certified Solution Architect - Professional”, “Certified Kubernetes Administrator” (CKA), and “Terraform Associate”. I realized that the majority of exams test your knowledge via multiple-choice questions (MCQs). This is fundamentally wrong and below I’ll explain why.

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Is it possible to build a personal website in one weekend? Short answer: yes. As my first post to kick it all off, I thought it would be great to deep dive on this topic. There are a lot of related posts out there, but most were vague at best and overlooked the less popular but important bits. Let’s firstly discuss on why should you build your website.