Dev Note

2026

Dev Note

When a Measure Becomes a Target: From the Window Tax to Pull Request Counts

I once wrote a script to tally how many PRs I contributed in a quarter, how many reviews I left, and how many tickets I closed, hoping to use numbers to prove my output to my manager. My manager simply remarked that performance isn't just about output. Years later, I finally understood—when a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. From the British window tax and the Hanoi rat bounty to evaluating developers by PR counts today, the underlying mechanism is exactly the same.

2024

2023

2022

2021

Dev Note

Amazon Polly - Text-to-Speech with Impressive Results

Polly is an Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud service that converts text to speech. While text-to-speech itself is nothing new, Polly does an excellent job of generating natural-sounding voices based on sentence structure, making it a tremendous boon for language learners. Beyond that, its potential applications are vast—from generating voiceovers for subtitles, scripts, and narration, to dialogues, or even recording entire podcasts directly with Polly.

2020

Dev Note

How to Integrate GitHub Actions into Your Project

In the past, setting up CI often meant teams had to spend time debating (and arguing over) different solutions like CircleCI, Drone CI, Jenkins, and so on. However, if your team already hosts code on GitHub, you can effortlessly integrate CI directly with GitHub. While it may not be a silver bullet or a one-size-fits-all magic solution, I find it remarkably easy to achieve common goals like running tests or setting up push-and-deploy pipelines. Here is an introduction.

2019

Dev Note

Introduction to Goworker — Implementing Workers with Redis

Recently, I've been gradually migrating a project from Ruby on Rails to Golang. Part of the reason is wanting to practice writing its rather quirky syntax to see how it feels, and another part is experiencing Golang's power firsthand while learning how to organize code without an established framework. Today, I'm going to introduce goworker. The reason it caught my eye is that it was the first result when searching for "go worker"...

2018

2017