Reinaldy Rafli

I tinkered with software since I was 12 years old (a 6th grader). Now I work as a software engineer (that usually helps out devops stuff) for a finance company in Jakarta, Indonesia. I learned computer things without attending any formal education, through this blog, I wish to give back every of my knowledge to the public.

I'm always open for any question or inquiries, submit yours to hello[at]reinaldyrafli.com. Let's communicate the old-school way.

Incident lesson learned: Be conservative of upgrades, understand the implications

Sep 15, 2024 • 457 words

I'm hoping this is just me, but as someone who's keen to using latest and greatest version of a software, the latest version, that is. I've developed a habit of frequently upgrading the softwares on my system. That includes the Linux server on my company that's within my reach. For internal services, upgrading frequently is not a problem (most of the time), but for external services that we built ourselves, it's... a problem. This will be a short post that will remind you to check every changelog and upgra...

How to jump to Open Source scene

Jul 28, 2024 • 1153 words

A friend of mine (and he also read this blog sometimes) asks me to create a post regarding how to jump into the open source scene a while back. At first, I thought it's not something interesting that people would read, but let's give it a go. Why I jumped to Open Source scene Let's start with my own story. You might see me active on GitHub, producing codes that can be viewed publicly. I don't remember the exact reason of me doing that in the early days, but as I remembering it, it's just for two simple...

The Two Types of Programmers: Logician and Mathematician

Jul 14, 2024 • 1136 words

Oftentimes, it's said that being a programmer means you have to be good at maths because the original term of "computer" is for people doing mathematical calculation. If you were to create a program that are basically a machine executing a bunch of calculation, you should be good at mathematics.. right? Well this topic is something that has been hotly debated on some platform, and mostly everyone has been thinking about it. Whether you should learn some advanced math just to get better at programming. But ...

On Appreciating Others

Jun 9, 2024 • 291 words

I think I've been watching too much animes or reading too much mangas lately. I recognized that in Japanese business culture, there is this phrase of お疲れ様でした (Otsukare-sama deshita) in which it's described as one of "untranslatable Japanese word" that could have different meanings depending on the situation. It can mean "hello", "well done", "you must be tired", "see you", "good-bye", or maybe there's more. Although, on most mangas that I read, it's translated to "thank you for your hard work". I know tha...

Deploying Rust code on production

May 5, 2024 • 798 words

Yep, I said it. I finally published my Rust code on production and it runs smoothly. This post will be a quick one describing my experience on deploying a backend application written in Rust. Why Rust? Some people would give out reasons like "performance", or "benefits of the type system". But, that's not the case for me. It's okay if the application that I'm handling is not performant, and I don't really care about the type system. The problem lies on there's little to no users for the application -- ...

Incident lesson learned: Do not depends on system dependencies!

Apr 15, 2024 • 561 words

Last month, my company had an incident that causes a certain part of our system to goes down. We're running everything on-premise since it's regulated by the law of financial institution of Indonesia, so we can't really go with cloud. It was caused by a sudden Virtual Machine failure that causes the VM to be corrupted. There were no backups or snapshot for that VM. The incident itself last for the entire week, and we're struggling to get it working again. The case of tightly-coupled systems There are n...

My Initial Thoughts on Hono

Mar 29, 2024 • 649 words

For those who don't know, Hono (their site is at hono.dev) is yet another server-side framework for building HTTP servers in Javascript. It's comparable to Express, Fastify, and so on forth. It's minimalistic, yet it runs on most platform and runtimes, like Node, Deno, Cloudflare Workers, and even Bun. It's also advertised as ultrafast, in which I don't really care. But that is what Hono is selling to the world. At first I thought there's no way you can beat Fastify on speed benchmark, ...

With self-documenting code, do you still need documentation?

Mar 25, 2024 • 2165 words

TLDR: The answer is yes. But let me elaborate further for you. What self-documenting code is for? The first argument on why self-documenting code is important, simply because some developers uses obscure names for their function, variables, and even files. Most of them hides with the reasoning of the infamous "2 hard things in computer science", in which are (1) cache invalidation, (2) naming things. But if you think very carefully, naming things is...

How I moved my stuff from Contabo to Greencloud

Jan 29, 2024 • 253 words

This will be a very quick blog post describing how I migrated by Debian server instance from Contabo to Greencloud. I won't elaborate more about why I moved other than it's faaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar cheaper on Greencloud ($45 per year) rather than on Contabo ($11 per month, meaning $132 per year). I loved both performance, as I don't really utilize my personal server that much. The only issue was my financial capabilities. The way I migrated my stuff is just to rsync my home directory (around 600MB) to the new ...

Do we need to sacrifice privacy for metrics?

Jan 14, 2024 • 704 words

A while ago I was tasked with handling my company's outgoing email, it's to help them track how many customers did open the email. This means I need to implement email spy pixel tracking, in which it kind of invade the user's email privacy. ProtonMail, one of the top privacy-centric service for emails, disables any spy pixel that's exist on the email. That is good enoug...

System Design for Junior Software Engineers

Dec 3, 2023 • 1624 words

I'm currently starting a process of rewriting an old software on my company that handles customer registration (yes, registration is its' own big chunk of work for a finance company). The reason of it is very simple, no one in the office are bold enough to maintain the app, and it's written in PHP 7.3 using old Code Igniter 3 framework, with MySQL 5.7 database that's gotten too much hack and modifications to make everything works together. The plan is to overhaul everything to make the operational side of t...

Lesson learned from running a community tech conference

Nov 26, 2023 • 1654 words

Yes, I basically led a team of 5 people to run what came to be TeknumConf 2023. An independent, no-sponsor, paid, self-sufficient community-based meetup consisting of keynote talks, career advice talkshow, and bunch of networking sessions that allows people to talk to each other and gain new connection. And yes, we created our own website, our own ticketing system, in which I will talk about it later. Why did we go independent? The way the community grows, whilst ...

The Importance of Software Dogfooding

Aug 27, 2023 • 694 words

The term dogfooding, also known as to eat your own dogfood is basically to consume your own product. Use your own product as if you're one of the users, or in short: be your own user. The majority of people, not just in Indonesia, but mostly around the world don't want to use their own products, with various reasons. One reason that I've encountered the most is "I've seen enough of this at work, why would I want to see that thing (referring to the product) again outside work?". I think, as a develo...

My Current Workflow (June 2023)

Aug 13, 2023 • 826 words

If you go to Google, and search for best productivity app, you will get like tons and tons of recommendation. With one from PCMag, another from TechRadar, another from Tom's Guide, another from Zapier, another from NBC News, another from LifeWire, and you stumble upon another search result from TechRadar.. It's a lot, you know, and it really takes a toll for me. Then there's this so-called productivity app specialized for note taking, another one specialized for tasks management, another one specialized ...

Why did I made this?

Aug 13, 2023 • 176 words

Simply I need a private place to write about the things that'd been occupying my head for some time. Getting restless of the thoughts, over and over again. I've been thinking of starting a personal dev blog somewhere that I don't need to run on my server, and I just can offload it somewhere so other people can still read it after I'm gone. Some of the people I know said that I'm good at explaining things they can understand easily, but reluctant enough to teach massive amount of people. I always love teach...