Hello from Taiwan 👋🏼 As many of you would have known that I was planning to start my new job earlier this year in January/February 2020 as a Test Engineer at Google, but as the COVID19 outbreak happened, we had to delay my starting date many multiple times, and I started working remotely back in April 2020 (OMG, its been over 6 months already). 

Recently as my home state of Victoria in Australia got out of our second wave of COVID19, I decided it was probably a good time to relocate, so I worked alongside Google's internal HR teams to help me relocate to Taiwan.

My exemption to leave Australia was granted by the Australian Border Force (Department of Home Affairs) within two hours, I applied with my offer letter from Google Taiwan and an email explaining that my relocation was approved at this time. A big thanks to Kris Howard for her blog post for giving me an idea on how to apply for the exemption

Note: I had a different experience compared to - you can read about her process of her relocating to Germany

Visa was applied normally though I needed a special one which grants me special entry to Taiwan due to COVID19 outbreak

I also needed a negative COVID test, this was done through Healius as I had no symptoms, and I didn't want to visit a GP several times (one for screening - could have done a telehealth, one for the actual swab, and one to pickup the negative certificate). Through Healius, I booked received the request, did the swab at a collections centre and received the negative test result around 8 hours later. - which is really impressive as at the height of Victoria's second wave, turnaround time was 24-96 hours.

The airport was really eerie, check-in was slow and included temperature checks, ABF checks, visa checks, etc. After the check in only 1 line for baggage and body scan security was open, and was relatively slower than usual due to the fact that a lot of the baggage was getting stuck in the x-ray machines, immigration was straightforward and easy with the e-Gates.

The walk afterwards through duty free and the other shops to the gates was really dark, and something that I have never experienced before.

Melbourne Airport COVID-19 Walk to Gate Experience

The seats were empty, I had an entire row of seats to myself!!! 

Thats all from me for now, I will write more in a seperate post on my experience with the entry into Taiwan and more about my first few days in quarantine later (hopefully over the weekend or early next week). As always thanks for reading and feel free to DM me over socials to let me know what you think of this post! 

Hello from Taiwan 👋🏼 As many of you would have known that I was planning to start my new job earlier this year in January/February 2020 as a Test Engineer at Google, but as the COVID19 outbreak happened, we had to delay my starting date many multiple times. Recently as my home state of Victoria in Australia got out of our second wave of COVID19, I decided it was probably a good time to relocate, so I worked alongside Google's internal HR teams to help me relocate to Taiwan.

Previously on my personal website, the blog content, after converting it back to Static Site Pages, I figured out that you can use webhooks to trigger rebuilds. As both Vercel (the hosting provider) and Prismic (the headless CMS provider) have support for webhooks. To do this, we are going to try and trigger a build on the creation and deletion of blog-posts documents.


Firstly, we go into our Vercel project and create a new webhook, to do this:

Fill in the blanks (I named my hook Prismic (Production) and had it target my production branch which is main), then click create.

Now copy the webhook URL into your prismic screen (under Settings → Webhooks), give it a name and paste the URL. then hit Add this webook!

Now you should be able to trigger it, try it out and look under your Deployments tab in Vercel to make sure it works.

And there we have it, static page generation (hopefully) for blogs using NextJS, Vercel and Prismic (with Webhooks!)

Following a discussion on Twitter with @timneutkens, you dont need to use webhooks as of NextJS v10. All you need to do is add fallback: blocking to your getStaticPaths response.

Previously on my personal website, the blog content, after converting it back to Static Site Pages, I figured out that you can use webhooks to trigger rebuilds. As both Vercel (the hosting provider) and Prismic (the headless CMS provider) have support for webhooks. To do this, we are going to try and trigger a build on the creation and deletion of blog-posts documents.

Something happened to my blog but you can't really tell if you visit the frontend of my blog! I migrated all my blog posts over to Prismic as a Headless CMS solution, after finding that I prefer writing my blog content over on a rich text editor and also having to roll out a change to my preview and main branches on my repository (github.com/ericjiang97/nextjs-personal) especially with blog posts.

This is achieved by every time a request goes onto my blog page under the /blog/[uid] directory, as part of the NextJS we fetch the blog contents and inject it via props.

export async function getServerSideProps({ params }: { params: { uid: string } }) {
  const { uid } = params;
  const blogPost = await client.getByUID('blog-post', uid, { fetchLinks: ['category.uid', 'category.category_name'] });
  
  if (!blogPost) {
    return {
      props: {
        error: 'Not Found',
      },
    };
  }
  
  const data = blogPost.data as PrismicBlogPost<PrismicBlogCategory>;
  
  return {
    props: { uid, data },
  };
}

You also may have noticed that I also added some customised types in order to support TypeScript a bit better, especially with some typed interfaces

For example, this is my types files for my Prismic Blog Content

import { RichTextBlock } from 'prismic-reactjs'; 

export interface PrismicBlogPost<T> { 
  title: RichTextBlock[];
  author: RichTextBlock[];
  preview: boolean;
  published_time: string;
  summary: string; 
  body: any; 
  banner?: { 
    dimensions: { 
      width: number; 
      height: number 
    }; 
    alt: null; 
    copyright: null; 
    url: string; 
  }; 
  category: PrismicBlogPostCategory<T>; 
} 

export interface PrismicBlogPostCategory<T> { 
    id: string; 
    type: 'category'; 
    tags: string[]; 
    slug: string; 
    lang: string; 
    uid: string; 
    link_type: 'Document'; 
    isBroken: false; 
    data: T; 
} 

export interface PrismicBlogCategory { id: string; category_name: string; }

You can check out the Prismic Blog Code here, please note that the Prismic API keys/secrets are provided as environment variables.

In a following update to my site, I've changed the way blog posts are fetched from getServerSideProps to getStaticProps on my landing and blog index pages, this will allow faster rendering on these pages. A big thanks to Jane Machun Wong for the tip!

Like many developers out there, Visual Studio Code (VSCode) is now my go to editor for almost everything (with the exception for Android Studio (for Android) and IntelliJ IDEA (for Java)). I really like customising my VSCode, so that it is easier for me to develop on.

There’s a lot of shortcuts that I use on a day to day basis within VSCode, the ones that I use the most include:

Command Palette: ⌘ (Command) + Shift + P

Duplicate current line up or down: ⌥ (Option) + Shift + (Up or Down arrow)

Move current line up or down: ⌥ (Option) + (Up or Down)

There’s a lot more shortcut keys that I use, but those are the most common ones. The VSCode team also has some awesome key binding posters that you can print out and stick near your desk (I used to print these out with macOS on one side and Windows on the other and stick it around the office).

There’s some neat settings that I always loved being enabled within my VSCode User Settings (globally).

The first one is Format on Save, with this enabled VSCode automatically formats the file you are working on, it picks up ESLint, TSLint and Prettier configs which is pretty neat.

The second one is the Terminal Font Family, if you customised ZSH like me, the default terminal sometimes doesn’t know what font to render your icons in your terminal in and you’ll end up with question marks in boxes.

The last one is Enable Commit Signing, this automatically uses the -S for your commits, (use this if you use GPG signing for your git commits!) and integrates nicely with VSCode’s inbuilt Git feature.

I always loved the customisability of VSCode with the community building many beautiful plugins (and language support!).

Excluding language based plugins such as C/C++, Dart, Python, etc. I usually add themes, formatters, and other tools that I use.

These plugins help me with my day-to-day use.

GitLens: gives you the ability to see the history of the file, in addition to files. Also can use git blame more easily too! 🙈

Polacode: Share your code by sending awesome screenshots!

Themes that I love using include Halcyon and One Dark Pro

There’s a lot more tips and tricks that I use for my VSCode, but they’re not really for everyone.

Supercharging your development environment on Visual Studio Code

It is absolutely exciting to announce that I have (finally) graduated. While I really wanted to celebrate this amazing event in my life with everyone, this year has really been unprecedented and therefore has been really hard to celebrate with everyone in-person.

From a really young age, I’ve really loved playing with technology and solving problems. For me, especially being impacted by the people around me especially during high school and working alongside people within tech support. Solving and helping fix people’s technological problems and issues have always been something that I’ve enjoyed. Being the eldest in my family, and the first person in my family to complete my Victorian Certificate of Education (with not really the ATAR that I wanted) I didn’t know what to expect when I first got my university offers. I ended up getting two offers (across two different VTAC rounds) first one was from Monash University and the second was a full scholarship offer from Swinburne University of Technology, and I ended up taking the offer of a double degree of Bachelor of Business and Information Technology at Monash. My parents were initially a bit hesitant about myself doing an IT degree, especially at that time the job market for IT professionals was small and it was really hard to find a job (paling in comparison to what it is now), but they also knew that I loved IT so they’ve gradually accepted it.

My time at university has been with a lot of ups and downs, meeting friends across different courses (especially those in the Computer Science and Software Engineering degrees), has impacted my way of thinking and interpreting problems. In my first year, because I was in the Bachelor of Business and Information Technology double degree, I ended up having to travel between the Caulfield and Clayton campuses quite a bit (thanks Amelia for making fun of this), which was really tiring and hectic too (making classes within 1 minute on the occasion). In one of the units, I met two other students who were working on MARIE.js and I wanted to take part too, so that winter holiday we took part of the Winter Research Scholarship Program, and that was my first taste of the research field.

As the year continued, I found that I enjoyed my IT units more than my business units and following discussion with friends, I decided to transfer to the Bachelor of Information Technology degree so that I can explore both Cybersecurity and Computer Science units a lot more. It was during this time, I found it was almost impossible to talk to course advisers, which would help me transfer my course across, after talking to Josh about it, we decided to start a project which would utilise the Unit Guides to help students plan their degree out and that eventually became to be known as MonPlan. MonPlan was like a cool startup that was acquired by Monash within the Innovation Space at eSolutions (central IT department at Monash), and over time we had 14 students join our team. You can read more about my journey and what I’ve learnt at eSolutions here and how we started MonPlan here.

Towards the end of my degree, I wasn’t entirely sure where I wanted to head towards, from my time at eSolutions I’ve experienced many roles such as PM, Full-Stack and Cloud Engineering. I knew I wanted to get into the DevOps and Site Reliability Engineering space to experience ‘more sides of the tech industry’. So I applied at many places to see how far I would go. Never in my mind I would get an interview offer from Google (a place that I’d applied at 7 times before this current attempt), wanting to see how the interview process worked at Google compared to other places and just seeing how far through the process I could go I immediately said yes, and going through 1 phone screen and 4 (on-site) video call interviews, I was given an offer and accepted the offer.

Something that I want to say to future students that are either at university or going through high school exams is: Yes, this year has been tough, humans are resilient, you’ll get through it - all you need to do is follow your dreams and passion, don't give up and everything is reachable. Looking back this past five years, I never knew that I would end up here at Google from when I finished high school.

Without the support of all my classmates, friends, family and awesome managers at Monash, a big shout-out to them and I look forward to catching up with everyone. Special thanks to: Emily Dao, Josh Nelsson-Smith, Saurabh Joshi, Nicholas Whittaker, Linh Truong, Chau Lam, Teresa Finlayson, you guys have really helped a lot throughout my journey both studying and working at Monash.

It is absolutely exciting to announce that I have (finally) graduated. While I really wanted to celebrate this amazing event in my life with everyone, this year has really been unprecedented and therefore it is really hard to celebrate with everyone in-person.

A few days ago whilst browsing through my old repositories on GitHub, I've discovered a really old app which showcased chaining some really awesome technologies together. This app showed what music I was playing anytime on Spotify or iTunes via Last.fm.

This older version was built in ReactJS + Material UI (v2) you can tell its really old :P

I recently migrated this to be part of this website, the technology is still pretty much the same, basically on my computer/laptop, I have the last.fm scrobbler which 'observes' what music I'm playing,whether its through iTunes or Spotify and broadcasts it on the app.

Then the page uses the Last.fm API to grab the latest information.

I reckon the new version looks pretty cool!! Check it out at ericjiang.dev/music

As part of my way of giving back to society apart from volunteering and mentoring, I'm starting to kick off some donations and charity work. This past financial year (FY2019-2020), I've donated over A$220 to charities. This is broken down into $200 matched by my employer and $20 unmatched.

The bulk of the donations went to as part of the Black Lives Matter movement, with $100 going to foundations which support the movement in the US and a further $100 going to Indigenous Literacy Foundation here in Australia.

Supporting the Black community (Social Equality): $100

Indigenous Literacy Foundation (Social Equality): $100

To track this further I've launched my philantrophy page to help breakdown these numbers over the past few years further you can check this page out at: https://ericjiang.dev/philanthropy.

If you have any charities that you want to donate to, reach out I'll be happy to try and match your donations

As you all may have been aware over the past few months, the COVID-19 Coronavirus outbreak started spreading all over the world and into Australia. I’ve been tracking the Australian cases as it started to slowly climb the exponential curve, with most of the cases being imported (and still is) and now central way of keeping track of it. I decided to build a tool which captures this data source from various government websites.

The entire script is automated with Python, and runs every two hours. So the script automatically crawls through various Department of Health websites across the various states (cause this is reported by the states not the Federal Government) and collects certain data points, for example: the Airline, Flight Number, Origin, Destination and Close Contact Rows, Arrival Date.

Then the symptom onset date is calculated by adding 2 weeks onto the arrival date, this is the standard as defined by both the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the Australian Federal Department of Health.

After the data is collated and wrangled with a simple GitHub Action script, it commits it to the Frontend/Backend Repository to be served over Google App Engine. One of the more complex tasks is finding all the edge cases of how to parse the dates, airline – cause this is all manually updated by humans (Humans, smh. Am i right?) and is really error prone.

One of the things I love to do especially is making information more readable and organise it in a way so that people can read it and access it via one single location or source of truth.

You can try the app at https://covid19-flights.ericjiang.dev

I you all may have been aware over the past few months, the COVID-19 Coronavirus outbreak started spreading all over the world and into Australia. I’ve been tracking the Australian cases as it started to slowly climb the exponential curve, with most of the cases being imported (and still is) and now central way of keeping track of it. I decided to build a tool which captures this data source from various government websites.

Analysing COVID-19 Flights in Australia with Python.

I use my terminal 90-100% of the time whenever I’m on my MacBook Pro and like many other developers I really like customising my terminal so that it helps me with my workflow.

I started using ZSH before Apple released it as the default shell in macOS Catalina, alongside with iTerm2. This combination was mainly done with Oh-My-ZSH and iTerm2. Recently I discovered PowerLevel10k which basically does the same thing as powerlevel9k but waaaaaaayyyy faster.

This step is fairly straight forward simply following the instructions at Oh-my-Zsh and you can install it, or you can just copy the install script below (installs via curl)

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ohmyzsh/ohmyzsh/master/tools/install.sh)"

iTerm2 is more straightforward, simply visit the website and just drag-n-drop it into your applications folder.

Now you can install powerlevel10k, simply visit the site: https://github.com/romkatv/powerlevel10k#oh-my-zsh

Now follow the prompts and you should have a new and awesome tool!

And that’s it! We’re now at the end of 2019 which also means it’s the end of the decade too. These past 10 years have gone by in a flash, at the start of the decade I started high school, now at the end of it I finished my degree at Monash University. So here’s a look back across 2019.

A Look back on 2019 – a year of achievement

I know that in my review from last year I talked about how fast it has gone by, this year felt more fast paced then ever before. But this year, after coming back from a long well-deserved holiday, I felt that I have achieved more than ever.

Towards the end of last year, we released MonPlan as the university’s official enterprise course planning software. At the start of this year, we integrated into the enrolment processes for VTAC round offers – this was the first test of MonPlan with over 7000 users using our sites within the first few minutes of the offers going out. We also rolled out to South Africa and Malaysia in the later part of the year.

Towards May/June 2019, I made a tough decision to hand over a lot of the maintenance and development of MonPlan to the rest of the team, as I was beginning to field offers from external companies. I made this decision as it made me knowing full well that MonPlan was in good hands when I left.

Something that really surprised me was that I was announced as a finalist of the itNews Benchmark awards – the awards night was hosted at KPMG Barangaroo in Sydney. Surprisingly I took the award jointly with the other finalist Fiona Sparks of Victoria’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS).

In November 2019, I said goodbye to Monash eSolutions as I had taken up an offer with Google, where I will be starting as a Test Engineer mid-February next year. You can read more about my reflection of my time at eSolutions here. The interviews were pretty hectic, overall I did 5 interviews (1 initial phone call and 4 ‘on-site’ interviews), with a lot of practice on LeetCode (at least 3-4 problems per day, for 3 weeks up to the interviews).

A few weeks ago, I also wrapped up my degree at Monash. Which means I am graduating next May (let me know if you want to come) !

Something that I am always passionate about is giving back to the community.

At the start of this I was elected Graduate Representative of WIRED. Some of the major events that I organised included TechFest and Bit By Bit Hackathon.

These events were really enjoyed by the students, hopefully will continue over the coming years.

Overall, this year has been the fastest and most hectic its ever been, with the end of the decade coming up, I feel like I have accomplished a lot this year. And hope that next year is even better.

A big thanks to my friends and family for being there for me for the past couple of years, and I know that moving away from Melbourne is going to be sad but I will always come back and visit. You know who you are.

Let me if you want to catch up before I head off!

To be honest, I don’t really like saying goodbyes and usually hope I can just disappear quietly. Yet, at the same time I realise that I have to do this otherwise I’ll probably regret it in a couple of months. So I’m writing this to reflect my time at Monash and what I have learnt along this journey.

In case you didn’t know, I’ve decided to take an offer with Google as a Test Engineer in Taiwan, and will begin next January.

I started back at Monash back in December 2016 to work on the first alpha of MonPlan (wow, that was a long time ago) after I first received an email from one of the directors asking about interest in building MonPlan with eSolutions. This was when I was transferring courses, and that there was no way to talk to course advisors, so my plan was to use a Google Sheet to plan out the rest of my course. Having worked on MARIE.js the prior semester, I had the idea of making it a web application. After having talk to many of my friends, Josh Nelsson-Smith and I decided to start working on it. That following day we did a post on social media asking if other students was interested in using an app like it. Surprisingly, we got some really postitive feedback. For those who don’t know, MonPlan is currently the official Monash University Course Planning Tool for students, by students.

Back then, like many other students I thought eSolutions was just a couple of ‘old dudes’ sitting in a cupboard working on some old servers and the second thought that crossed my mind was that the email was potentially fake. Yet Josh Nelsson-Smith and I decided to seize on the opportunity to deliver MonPlan.

And it was over the course of the 2 or 3 years that we worked on the development of MonPlan and FutureYou and working with different portfolios across the university to deliver both products. We hit major milestones along the way, we developed and built the concept of a product which helped connect your inspirations and what you’ve enjoyed to careers, and careers to courses, this was then pitched to several directors at central marketing (SMC). We then hit Beta with MonPlan in Feburary 2018.

Sometime along the way, I couldn’t see when MonPlan was going to be released, and was thinking about leaving the project. But then after talking to a few of my friends, I remembered why I started this project in the first place and that was to make every student’s lives easier. And so I picked myself back up and soldiered on.

Not many people know this, but back in late-2017 – MonPlan was competing with a vendor-built product, and that the project almost got shut down because of this. Over the course of a few months, and putting MonPlan through beta release and proving that both the faculty and students love our product, made us got chosen as the University’s official course planning tool.

WHEN IT HURTS - Powerful Motivational Speech

Something really important is that your mental health is really important. Being a hard worker I didn’t take any holidays, I was studying 4 units in addition to ~20 hours a week at work and during the holidays I was working full time, and this continued on for around 2 years and one day in 2018 I had a mental breakdown/panic attack. That is when I decided to take a holiday the following semester break, (it turned out to be 7 weeks, and I went to both Japan and China!!!), and I came back fresh and felt like I was ready to kick some amazing goals the following year. So yeah, have a healthy and balanced life-style is really important too!

I also picked up a new hobby which is photography, so outside of work hours I spending less time coding (and working 😅), instead I spend quite a bit of time editing and taking photos.

BELIEVE IN YOURSELF - Powerful Motivational Video

Always believe in yourself, this is connected to the ties first and second lesson(s) really well. This has actually happened to me many times throughout my time here at Monash.

The first time, was right after MonPlan’s Beta release in February 2019, I didn’t know if we were going to make it. Especially as we were competing with a vendor-product. But the design philosophies of user-centered design (putting the student first) in addition to the hard work of everyone in our team allowed us to be chosen as the University’s official enterprise course planning tool.

Even when applying at Google, I just didn’t know I will get the offer. Even when I did get the offer I was shocked, I was still like ‘how did I even get this?’. But almost all my friends was not surprised I got the offer.

Something that I was forced to learn was that I hard to organise my day, so in order to that, I synced up my personal, uni calendars under my work calendar. In addition I created a Custom Calendar to that I add classes into my calendar too (inviting both my staff and student accounts), also adjusting my out-of-work hours in my calendar settings too.

Every morning, either when I get into uni or work, the first thing I do is look at my calendar – working out my daily meetings, classes, and planning out the work I was going to do for that day. The meetings I accept are typically placed a minimum of 3 days ahead, otherwise I’ll just reject it, this allows me to keep my calendar neat and tidy in addition to allow me to take control of my time back.

MonPlan had a startup feel to it, we had to continuously iterate through many versions (as part of the University’s SAFe practices), in addition to hiring other students who had the same vision as us. We hired based on cultural fit in addition to technical skills, those who had better technical skills weren’t necessarily a better fit to the team.

And in October 2018, we officially released MonPlan as the official enterprise student course planning software to the entire university – the road to this release was long and not entirely smooth, a big thanks to everyone who was part of MonPlan and FutureYou, as well as to the managers, business partners, and everyone who helped us deliver MonPlan.

To all the Monash staff, students, friends, family and especially the Monash Community that I have interacted over my time at Monash, from the depth of my heart, I want to say thank you for all the joys, experience, lunches and snack-runs and just literally being there for me for the past 3 years. It’s been amazing and I really really really enjoyed contributing to the University life, and would love to come back in the future.

That’s all from me, once again thank you!

P.S. Do let me know if you are around and willing to grab a coffee (or bubble tea) – my emails and social DMs are always open.

As I previous stated back in late February 2019, that this year was going to be hectic. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been quite busy, with:

Going up to Sydney for the 2019 IT News Benchmark Awards – in which I manage to win the Rising Star Category, you can read more about that

Did my first round video technical interview with Google for a Test Engineering (SRE) role in Taiwan! 🇹🇼. Fingers-crossed on getting into next stage of the interviews

Was at Industry Night promoting MonPlan and working with eSolutions, Monash University MonPlan will be placed in Operational Mode as of 1st April – meaning that all the major bugs/issues have been resolved.

Signed a new contract with Monash Uni, and as of 1st April – I’ve been promoted from a Junior Software Engineer into a Software Engineer!

I’ve been elected the Graduate Representative of Wired Monash, which is the IT Student Club at Monash.

My plans after uni isn’t that amazing, I’ve applied for a few roles across some really big tech companies – Google (Sydney & Taiwan), Atlassian (Sydney) and REA Group (Melbourne). Though if I don’t get any of these roles, I’ll be applying for a mid level roles later this year. So yeah, I’d applied for this role (Test Engineering) back in January, and the main reason why I applied for this role that’s going to be located in Taiwan, is not only because I love doing DevOps/SRE, I also wanted to travel a bit more (especially back to Japan – 🤣)

Yep, that’s right despite my not so good grades/GPA, I’ve managed to snag a video interview with Google. The interview went fairly well, I did a lot of Hackerrankquestions before the interview. But for those who are looking for a test engineering role – the questions were straightforward, having a knowledge for general data structures, SRE/DevOps/SysAdmin strategies and complexity will be very beneficial.

I’m hope that I can get this role though! 🤞

As I previous stated back in late February 2019, that this year was going to be hectic Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been quite busy, with...

It’s a great honour and privilege to win the 2019 itnews #BenchmarkAwards – Rising Star Category along side Fiona Sparks (Go Victoria!)

Firstly, a big thanks to Josh Nelsson-Smith who started out this project (originally as an Open Source Project) with me – without your initial help and your awesome development and management skills, we wouldn’t have transformed the student experience. Also a thanks to all the other students who worked on this project: Saurabh Joshi, Charles Campton, Robert Koch, David Copley, Harry Ferrier, Ben Clare, Isabel Sprengers, David Lei, Callistus Tan, Katie Ng, Nicholas Whittaker, Mansi Vyas, Hyun Shim, Rebecca Young and Benjamin Yap – you guys are awesome!

Special thanks to Teresa Finlayson, Trevor Woods for really transforming and supporting Student Innovation at Monash University, and thanks to Edwina Harvison for supporting this project through the Student First Program.

Another big thanks goes out to the mentors and managers who without the help of we wouldn’t have made it this far: Linh Truong, Chau Lam and William Harvey.

You can check out the original news article here

That was quick! 2018 went by in a breeze and we’re here with a new year. For me this year, it was about making a difference to the community.

Firstly, a big thank you to everyone (friends, family, co-workers) who have supported me throughout this year. And all the best for 2019!

As many of you know, MonPlan this year has been bigger than ever. In February, we launched MonPlan into beta – which is one of our biggest launches ever. The university adopted our product as the official course planning tool shortly afterwards. And just recently in October, we officially released MonPlan – a big thank you goes out to everyone who has supported us all the way through the journey.

Firstly I would like to thank Josh Nelsson-Smith who co-founded this awesome project with me, having working with him for the best part of 2 years, having supporting me when I was feeling not that great and learning a great many things with me was really amazing.

Another amazing person that I would like to thank is Saurabh Joshi, Saurabh is a really amazing person who is really great at what he does, but without his initial help at the start of the project MonPlan wouldn’t be where it is at.

All the awesome team members that we had: Charlie Campton-Strachan, David Copley, Robert Koch, Harry Ferrier, David Lei, Callistus Tan, Katie Ng, Nicholas Whittaker, Rebecca Young and Ben Clare: you guys really helped us get over the finish line, even though our team shrank in size and grew many times – but without the effort from you guys we wouldn’t be where we are. All the staff, managers and senior executives at eSolutions (such as Linh Truong, Chau Lam, Teresa Finlayson)

Lastly, all the friends who have supported me: Emily Dao, Michael Williams and Nick Priebatsch. I know that I’ve thanked you already, but without you guys being there for me and listening to me ramble about random stuff, I wouldn’t have been able to get most of the stress out.

For me, this year I’ve participated across two hacks: Hackamon and UniHack. I mentored at this years Hackamon instead of competing, helping others grow ideas, giving them tips on pitching is something that is really enjoyable and seeing an idea grow into a solution is what makes the entire experience worthwhile. As well as giving out two Tech talks on Git and rapid prototyping.

Giving back to the community is something that I believe that every tech person should do. This year I’ve been part of 2 meetup communities: JuniorDev and MusesCode (formerly NodeGirls Melbourne). For JuniorDev, I’ve given 1 tech talk (on GCP with NodeJS) and once again mentored at this year’s Hacktoberfest event. I’ve also mentored at an event aimed at teaching JavaScript/NodeJS/ECMAScript to beginners, as part of the MusesCode meetup community.

This year, I’ve picked up photography as a hobby – around September I brought a new Canon 800D DSLR. And have slowly taking photos and learnt how to process them through Photoshop. Check out some of my best photos here

I know that I told myself that I would travel last year in 2017 but then it got busy.

This year I ended up going to both Japan (with friends) and China (solo) for around 5 weeks: which has been really fun. Big thanks to everyone who have travelled with me and made the experience more enjoyable. I really want to head back to Japan at some point in the future – maybe to the northern part (like Hokkaido) next time.

I am really looking forward to 2019 – with new ideas (and with it, startup opportunities), looking for grad/junior/entry level positions and finishing off my degree part-time, new hobbies and friends, potentially more travelling – I’m sure it will be an awesome year.

That was quick! 2018 went by in a breeze and we’re here with a new year. For me this year, it was about making a difference to the community. Firstly, a big thank you to everyone (friends, family, co-workers) who have supported me throughout this year. And all the best for 2019!

This article is inspired by Josh Farr’s post about ‘Given it’s 2018 and knowing what you know now, what advice would you give to your 16-year old self?’

So you can find my answer to this question below.

‘Don’t only just study, go out explore and make the world a better place’ I’ve also taken the position that University is not only about studying, it’s also about how you learn and make a contribution to society. So why not start early? I’ve previously written an article about this, check it out here

But this is not always about tech. Yes it is true, we currently live in a digital world, there’s always ways to make a difference to the world.

Kai Kloepfer wanted to reduce gun violence in the US , he developed a fingerprint-sensor gun for the US

Amber Yang wanted to help reduce collisions with Space Junk, so she built a ML model that predicted impacts

These examples may seem too ambitious, I know a lot of problems exist in the world, but there aren’t any solutions. Some other examples include:

Monash University’s Timetable Allocation Swaps was done manually through in-person swaps then contacting Student Enrolments, etc…..(this was a very tedious approach). So a bunch of guys (Ishan Joshi, Surayez Rahman and Arni Mittal) got together during a Hackathon, built a demo. Over the later half of 2017 they worked with parts of the university (and Ben Clare joined the team) and this was launched as a pilot product during Semester 1 2018 — SwapMe

Even the two/three projects that I’ve built was around solving problems (they weren’t necessarily and still not part of my course): MonPlan was built to solve the problem where a student wants to figure out how their course should look like without have to go in to see a course adviser MARIE.js digitalise a old Java based application geckoDM was built to solve harder to download lectures over the echo360 platform, we have expanded from one university to users across 4 countries.

So, studying at university helps you to learn how you should study. Because you should never stop learning (I sort of tied that into Monash University’s motto — Ancora Imparo (or “I’m still learning”)

What advice would I have given to my 16 year old self.

Today, we are excited to announce the release of v2018.0.0. This release launches 🚀 us out of Alpha into Beta.

We have migrated our backend to the Australian region, meaning faster load times (334 ms to load a unit compared to 1.04s previously), a increase of around 70%! ⏩💯

This means, we can deliver faster content to the majority of our users, ensuring faster and smoother transactions.

Working with another project — Smart Electives has allowed us utilise a better search engine. We are using a system like Google which allows us to search better. Whether its searching ambiguous things from modern culture, all the way to rocket science, we’ve got you fam. 👪

More Mobile Friendly 📱 and Responsive 💻 then Ever Before

After looking at our user traffic we have decided to make our app more mobile friendly then before, with semester on the sidebar, as well as clearer shortcuts on the toolbar. But, we still recommend you to use a laptop.

Semester/Teaching Periods are now on the left of the units which belong in that teaching period

Icons are now display on the top of the sidebar

Adding Units are now done directly inside the teaching period or via the unit place holder

Unit Size (by Credit Points) resize per teaching period (not whole)

That’s right, you’ve heard me. You can now print and email course plans to whoever you like (just don’t spam email your course advisor, our system will kick 👢you off and block 🛡️you).

It’s really great that most of our users are returning to us. That’s why we are dedicated to be as transparent as possible, whether it’s feature requests all the way to issues. We’ve got a new issue form over via https://tinyurl.com/monplanissue and a new Public 🌏tracking board over at Trello for you to monitor and see your issue! https://trello.com/b/oYR5vu8S/public-bug-tracking-board 🐛For our delivery status visit: https://stats.uptimerobot.com/OM9AOf2D0

2018 Units and Course Maps (really really minor, but whatever)

Credit Points are displayed on the front of each unit to make it clearer about the weights of each unit.

Here is some notes which may affect external systems

monPlan Prod API (JP Region, monplan-api-dev)

This service will become a dev environment, where we test out various new endpoints, all of this means that this application will not become our source of truth and may have a degraded service from time to time.

monPlan Dev API (JP Region, monplan-api-development)

This service will be suspended and shut down.

monPlan Prod AU API (AU Region, monplan-api-au-prod)

This is a new service, the API URI is https://monplan-api-au-prod.appspot.com with same endpoints as the previous dev environment

monPlan Search API (AU Region, monplan-searchapi-prod)

This is a new service. Just send a POST request to https://monplan-searchapi-prod.appspot.com with a JSON object.

{
    search: // text: ,
    filter: // object: the object to search,
    from: 0 // integer,
    size: 30 // integer: number of results,
}

Today, we are excited to announce the release of v2018.0.0. This release launches 🚀 MonPlan out of Alpha and into Beta.

As we are coming to our first birthday, we want to really look back on how we grew monPlan to what it is today.

At the start we used many ways of looking at course planning, such as using Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets, even paper. But we always ran into 1 singular problem, every time we had to look through several tabs of the Monash Handbook, (we will back to this later). We also had to spent a few hours just to talk a course advisor, while the course advisors spread out multiple plans across the table talking to us about our course. This was not really helpful.

All the unit rules were spread all all over the place, different places gave different information. We decided to start off with a simple post to see if this was a pain point for other students with apost on Monash Stalkerspace.

This was fairly supported by the student community. So we decided to proceed ahead. Using various purpose-built tools such as a Unit Handbook Scraper (https://github.com/monplan/monScrape/tree/master/UnitScraper) we built a ‘basic’ version of the application which now currently lives at https://monplan.github.io/monPlan-Legacy

And then suddenly, we were approached by a eSolutions Director, Teresa Finlayson who asked us if we were willing to continue development alongside eSolutions. We (we being Josh Nelsson-Smith and Eric Jiang) agreed as we both believed that it would really help improve the student community. This was officially started in December 2016.

And the rest is history, we continued development with a newer technology and our application has being growing everyday.

Looking back we really encourage everyone to continue developing whatever it is you are interested in. The team has really helped shape the student innovation pathway for other students.

We have worked with various senior managers at eSolutions, to help develop and shape the following:

Test.Drive — Monash University’s student incubation program

Some cool projects which will be released soon, sponsored by some faculties and departments across the university.

As one of the many developers on this team, I am very happy to announce our new public release! This is one of latest patches not only going back to our roots and making it better but also bringing the foundations of some key new features which will be present in the application over the next few months.

This release allows us to take a look at where we are and where we want to move forward. monPlan is really about making the journey which students take whilst studying at Monash more easier, and make the information much more accessible. So we had to go back where we begun, and redo the entire site one step-at a time and make it modern, and similar to other Monash Apps, making the transition between the sites more easier.

The site is now rebranded, we have incoporated many Material Design Principles to make the app look more modern, as well as taking it above and beyond with our AX Fixes.

This release introduces one of our testing features, users can login via Google and Facebook and sign up for an account. But most of these will change over the next few weeks as we introduce Monash SSO support, meaning current students can login via SSO and my.Monash. It is now known as my monPlan.

We are also excited to announce our monPlan Insiders Program. The program looks at: letting you (the users) attend our bi-monthly testing workshops, vote on designs as well as testing out new functionality that we are introducing. This is available here: https://monplaninsiders.slack.com/ and you can signup over this link.

But first we have been driven by many fixes that will help us towards a more functional and better app that allows everyone to use across multiple sites.

Issues fixed includes: #493 (CRIC-002), SECMED-001.

Other issues submitted by our community and our support teams have gradually improved the application, such as: Key Accessiblity Fixes allows users with AX Supported Browsers to use within our site The team thanks for being on this journey with us so far! We would very much appreciate feedback. We can be contacted via email at esol-stft-monplan-l@monash.edu as well as over the “Give us Feedback” link in the component sidebar.

Eric Jiang
Project Lead and Co-Founder monPlan
E: eric.jiang@monash.edu

Originally published at monplandevblog.wordpress.com on May 31, 2017.

As one of the many developers on this team, I am very happy to announce our new public release!This is one of latest patches not only going back to our roots and making it better but also bringing the foundations of some key new features which will be present in the application over the next few months.

G'day, I'm Eric.

I’m a Test Engineer at Google.

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