Jiaqi's Blog

It takes quite a lot of energy to finish watching the entire five seasons of Breaking Bad. To finish it strong, this weekend I decided to try something that I haven't done for almost 18 years.

This weekend, aside from taking kid to football game and various classes, changing diapers and watching "Breaking bad", I've been working on an new small open source library, Gitcon , which allows Java application to decouple some configuration into a standalone source repository so that software owner can modify configuration without deploying application for every modification. It is a cheap approach to dynamic configuration. By the way, I was very surprise to find out that the term "Gitcon" has not been reserved for "Git conference" so far. Requirements What led me to this project was a set of requirements: As a start, the configuration means properties file As a start, only Git source repository needs to be supported As a start, it only needs to gets configuration for once when application starts. The configuration is used to populate Spring application context where beans are mostly singletons. Software owner needs to restart applica...

A week ago I came out from a surgery room in Memorial hospital in South Bend and had one of my most painful moments in life. In the following week, pain pill and IV were my friends. Now after a week of recovery, I finally got back to my sanity and sit in front of my computer. Feb 25th noon, I fell down on an icy drive way on my way to the car. It wasn't a light fall. When it happened I heard a sharp pop and saw my right foot bent up. This is something I have only seen on YouTube. Fortunately my wife was with me, it could be a whole lot worse without her. At the very second I fall on the ground many things passed my mind. My pregnant wife, my daughter whom I read story to, my travel plan in next month, my job in Chicago, and the fact that my son will grow up with a cripple daddy who probably can't hold him. Then came the pain, which confirmed what happened is real. For the second time in life, an ambulance took me to hospital. A nurse looked at CT scan in hospital and said,...

On Nov 14th, in AWS re:invent conference day 2 keynote , Netflix announced 2013 Cloud Prize award winners . I was very lucky and my project, datamung , is one of the ten winners. Datamung received the award for best datastore integration. Datamung is a Java open source web application that backs up RDS MySQL database into S3 using AWS Simple Workflow and EC2. It's a RESTful service and website on top of it, a single installation allows multiple AWS users to backup their database living in their own AWS accounts. The fact that it uses mysqldump command indicates that the backup result in S3 is a SQL file ready to use across AWS accounts, regions, VPC, or outside of AWS network. If you are interested please jump into the Datamung project wiki to find out more. Ironically, in the same keynote session where winner list was announced, 40 minutes later Werner Vogels announced a cross-region RDS replication feature which targets the same problem that Datamung attempts to so...

Finally, it's July 4th when everyone comes to Navy Pier, pays $20/hour parking to watch exciting fireworks, despite the fact that the exactly same fireworks happens every Wednesday and Saturday night here all summer long.

Ömer Aşık had a decent season in Houston Rockets and my wife's best friend is getting married in Turkey. Therefore Yilin, my wife and I decided to spend a week in Istanbul, which turned out to be the most amazing and memorable vacation we ever had. Way too many things to do If I ever going to visit Istanbul again, I would definitely reserve at least a month. There are way too many interesting things to do in Istanbul for a week-long vacation. Heaven of food Restaurants cover every inch of the old town. I wonder if people here ever need to cook at home. The restaurants look good and cheap. Then later we asked a Turkish friend if she cooks, she said not really since restaurants are good and cheap. Being a Chinese picky eater, I felt dubious about the quality of food from these "good and cheap" restaurants. Finally we had chance to have a bite, from which point we couldn't stop. If I were born in Turkey, I would be a happy Turkish programmer who never cooks....