Stack Overflow Meetup in Bangkok

On the Stackoverflow blog, it was announced that April 6, 2011 would be Worldwide Stack Overflow Meetup. They created a meetup page at: Stackoverflow Meetup.

BKK Web Meetup also hosted a meetup on IDEs and other dev tools. Presentations were given on Eclipse  (by @nadam9) and Vim (by @ches). Our gracious host was, as always, Web Courses Bangkok. Afterwards, we had the usual beer/food meetup at Singha Beer Park not too far away.

I posted pictures on twitter and the chat-room right away too. Please check out Stackoverflow World-Wide Meetups-- Success! blog post. Two pictures from our meetup was posted!

Here are some pictures, full album here.

Thoughts from the March BKK Web Meetup

The BKK Web Meetup last night was pretty awesome. It was the biggest turnout I've seen yet, and it was also very interactive. Plenty of discussion, questions, and even stories came from the attendees.

The topic was: Let's talk about hiring and training developers. Benjamin Scherrey was the presenter. Some bullet points that I took away:

• There are some cultural barriers to understand in hiring a Thai/Asian software developer.
• There are some cultural barriers dealing with Thai clients.
• Geek culture trumps Asian culture
• Geeks are geeks, make them happy by giving them challenges. 
• Give developers a technical career path other than being manager that doesn't code. 
• Give developers whatever title they want.
• Don't use recruiters to hire talent. 
• Be Agile (see Agile Software Development).
• Work culture matters.
• The technology industry in Thailand is improving.
• Thailand has technical talent, just need to know how to reach out to them.

Full album here.

Overall, not too different from what many of my Chicago user groups I attended talk about. Software development has a lot of arts in it over science-- at least at the professional real world sense (leaving out research/academia). With that, from my experience, there can be a lot of burn-out from the amount of time a developer puts in front of the computer programming. Developers need technical challenges over being a drone that codes horribly day-in and day-out. Benjamin is right, there needs to be a technical path given other than to grow into a manager that never codes again.

In the community of developers I hang out with in Chicago, there's the Manifesto for Software Craftsmanship, which tries to tackle some of the issues. But in my honest opinion, that can be a bit much-- in which case I prefer: Solver's Manifesto-- which I relate to a bit more. And then there's also: The Motherfucking Manifesto For Programming, Motherfuckers. Enough said.

But the points about the cultural barriers is spot on. As a Thai-American that's been living in Thailand for nearly five months now, I still go through a lot of culture shock that I don't think should be in the professional workplace.

Some that I would like to briefly point out:

• Young people must always respect and listen to older generation. This isn't a bad thing, but the older generation may not be that experienced or even correct, so there is a time to not just listen, but to speak up against the senior.
• Thai people tend to take criticisms personally.
• Problems get raised very late, instead of immediately or at the most appropriate time.
• Shyness to speak up and share ideas.

The picture below sums up how there is a weakness in how the Thai language is very traditional.

(Credit to my friend Amanda for taking a photo of this. Source is from BK Magazine)

I short, I think a solution to improving this is through community and better communication. Thai culture should get some injection of other ideas and cultures from outside of Thailand. But to keep this post short, I will perhaps blog about that some other time.

Further readings I recommend:

• Why Can't Programmers.. Program? by Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror)
• Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit--And You Should Too (a story I brought up during the meetup)
• Some tidbits from Joel Spolsky's talk last night on recruiting programmers
• The Programmer's Bill of Rights by Jeff Atwood (Coding Horror)
• The Joel Test: 12 Steps to Better Code by Joel Spolsky

Photos of Girls and Asahi Fireworks

On March 5, 2011, my friend and I got tickets to the Asahi Fireworks show. Obviously the fireworks show is at night, so during the day I took my camera out to play and test it out since I hadn't taken too many pictures with it lately.

What I didn't know was that there was a photo shoot and interviews of girls going on at Siam Paragon. I happened to be at the right place at the right time. Some pictures of pretty girls:













Full album of photoshoot here.

This was the first time I used my camera (Canon Rebel XT) to take pictures of fireworks. I was in bulb mode for the most part. The part that annoyed me was that the security there didn't allow me to set up my tripod in the VVIP (very very important person) section. How is that VVIP then? I kept moving to different areas and they kept saying that I wasn't allowed to set up my tripod. So I pretty much relied on my arms in bulb mode....

Anyway, after they let in people in from the outside, and more than half way through the show, I set up my tripod. At this point I was seated in an ocean of people, not like they could get to anyone who set up a tripod. I ended up switching to manual mode from bulb mode because I was just getting too much smoke in my pictures.

I think the problem was that I was seated not too far from a building/bridge that was well lit, so a lot of light was hitting the smoke already. There was a photographer's area, but it was far far away and as I heard it, very crowded. But it was definitely a better area to take photos of fireworks as they were far from the building.

Here are some photos of my first try taking pictures of fireworks:













Full album of fireworks here.

Pictures from Red Shirt January Rally

Near where I was staying, Ratchaprasong, the Red Shirts were having a lot of rallies-- right outside of Central World shopping mall. Since I was on my way to meet up with a friend for lunch there, I brought my camera to snap some photos.

















Full album here.

Disclaimer: In no way am I associated with any color shirts. I took these pictures to share what I saw.

TEDxBKK Pictures

A few weeks back, on March 3 2011, I attended TEDxBKK over at TCDC at the top floor at Emporium in Bangkok, Thailand. You can also follow them on twitter at @tedxbkk. Overall it was a good turnout, but I wasn't too enthusiastic about most of the talks though. The one that stuck out the most for me was David Christian's talk in the Knowledge Revolution session.

Here are the pictures:

Pictures from February 2011 BKK Web Meetup

Here are the pictures from last night's BKK Web Meetup session on Ruby on Rails. The presentation was by Ches Martin. Our gracious host was Web Courses Bangkok. I like how everyone who brought a laptop, brought a Macbook, as you can see from the pictures.













Full album here.

Afterwards was the usual beer meetup at Singha Beer Park a few blocks away (towards Asok BTS). It was a fun tech talk among expats here in Bangkok. Some of the topics that came up was how to have more of these tech events in Bangkok, community building, and possibly finding sponsorship for food/prizes. For one thing, we'd love to see more of the local Thais show up. Although, most of the talks would probably be in English, which I'm guessing could be a struggle for those that do not understand English well.