Entries this day: apply-to-visual-alpha broke-the-shit-out-of-vagrant

apply to visual alpha

(written 09:06 Monday 12 September 2022 JST)

Hello Visual Alpha team!

My name is Rob Nugen; I'm an American with permanent residency in Kawasaki, Kanagawa. https://www.robnugen.com/

Your job posting for Senior Full-stack Software Engineer looks great to me. I helped build and have been maintaining a PHP website for 10 years, guiding it from PHP 5.6 back in 2012 and currently testing our code in PHP 8.1 environment before deploying it in our production environment on AWS.

Regarding eXtreme Programming, in the process of migrating the PHP site above, I added testing processes (static testing with PHAN, and dynamic testing using Codeception), and set up a staging server to test deploys. I've also moved the client's database OFF their web server and moved it to RDS, which greatly simplifies upgrading the web server to new versions of Ubuntu.

Now, with Vagrant, I can spin up a VM on my local machine, automatically have it install Ansible on the VM and clone repos for the static test environment and for launching a new EC2 server on AWS then deploying code there. It's not yet a perfect one-button solution, and I haven't yet gotten to the point of "test with each commit," but I'm getting there.

Regarding ETL; I had to import messy data a couple of times when putting the website together. The first time was converting client data from their original system based on a proprietary database (not MySQL). This required importing CSV files encoded with Shift-jis, cleaning and converting to UTF-8.

Regarding design, the cleansed data was important into my custom designed MySQL database based on their data and requirements. In that process I made most of their data 3rd Normal, allowing much greater functionality plus dramatically faster searches.

Another ETL process was parsing hundreds of pages of html (not with a regex https://stackoverflow.com/a/1732454) to create a list of all train stations and lines in Tokyo.

Regarding leadership and teamwork; I have grown a peer-counseling group in Tokyo, sponsored by Mankind Project USA. It's all about learning about one's self while gaining skills for conflict resolution and living a life of integrity and accountability. https://www.mkpjapan.org/

I have played with Node.js and React a bit, but not really used them professionally. I'm excited for this chance to improve my knowledge with these technologies.

I've also often wondered about ways I can invest money while living in Japan. Your desire to "disrupt investment management industry" sounds like you have a similar focus!

I'm light on awareness of investment management, which I see at the top of your Desired Skills. I have a coarse overview of the basics, but not really details of fintech.

I have a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, and plan to live in Japan indefinitely.

best regards

• Rob

broke the shit out of vagrant

(written 15:12 Monday 12 September 2022 JST)

So weird.. After applying for Visual Alpha, I decided to start playing with node.js and couldn't spin up a basic VM with Vagrant. Hmmm.

I logged out of a Vagrant box that is right now running on my host, but Vagrant app says it's not running.

Hmmm.

I wiped ALL the Vagrant volumes from my computer but still couldn't spin up anything.

I uninstalled + reinstalled Vagrant but no luck.

I'm gonna reboot my machine now.

16:42

Oh good. Rebooting my machine, going for a walk, and watching Rick and Morty S6:E2 fixed it.