Heliosky

Thoughts by Gilang Hamidy

The Story

Thought

Social Networking and Social Awareness: How Virality Affects People’s Behavior on New Information

Preface This essay was submitted as an admission requirement for TU Munich in 2018. It is written around January 2018. I received admission from TUM although I did not take it since I received SECCLO scholarship. I was thinking to send this to newspaper since this topic is really important in Indonesia nowadays, but I didn’t have the confidence. However, looking at what happened today in Indonesia, I decided to...

Compiler / Geek Stuffs

Learning LLVM: Compiling LLVM

LLVM is a set of compiler toolchains which supports various programming languages and various target machines. Its popularity is currently rising, where according to JetBrains, around 26% of C++ developers are using it to compile C++. Although it is still far to reach the ubiquity of GCC toolchain, it is being adopted across industries and it has a very fast moving development since many of the developers are sponsored by...

Thought

Motivation Letter Example: Erasmus+ Security and Cloud Computing (SECCLO)

As the admission process for this year is completed, I think it is okay to publish my motivation letter so other fellow prospective students, on either this program or other program as well, can learn from it. This motivation letter is targeted for Security and Cloud Computing (SECCLO), an Erasmus+ program. I applied for 2018 intake and all praise to God that I nailed the admission. The problem statement is:...

Geek Stuffs / General Computer Science / VPS Story

VPS Experience (Part 2): Configuring Fedora for VPS

Since I rented my current VPS web last year, I had been using CentOS 7.4 for its operating system. It is derived from Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) project which offers similar stability to an enterprise-grade server. Unfortunately, a few days ago I discovered that some packages in CentOS were really outdated, even on the latest version (7.6). Those packages are related to software development, such as GCC, Clang toolchains,...

Geek Stuffs / VPS Story

Migrating Server (Again)

Apparently, I didn’t realize an email two weeks ago that my previous VPS hosting, WebSound decided to kick all its customer as they are shutting down the VPS business. I finally noticed that they sent me an e-mail 2 days ago about this issue. They said that they are going to shut down all VPS on March 10! They only give 2 weeks notice period of their cancellation and they...

Thought

Motivation Letter Example: TUM Informatics

I am inspired by one of my friends, Fariz Darari, to publish an example of motivation letter to inspire and help fellow prospective applicants to Master’s or Doctorate degree. Therefore, I will publish several of my motivation letters I wrote for my last application last year. This one is for Technische Universität München (TUM) or Technical University of Munich. I applied for Master’s degree in Informatics which uses English as...

Thought

Career Journey: Why I Ditched My Career as Consultant at Accenture

This draft has been sitting for more than 2 years now.  Basically a lot has happened within few years back, from my failed attempt to get a seat on a first-class university in US, to my decision on moving out from consulting business to more engineer work. But let’s just cut the story short. Recently I have a conversation with some friends regarding what makes us moving out of our employer to...

C++ / Geek Stuffs / General Computer Science

Inspiring Chats with Bjarne Stroustrup

I was invited for students dinner at Cppcon. Technically speaking I am currently a student, so despite I’m older than many other students, I can join them for free pizza 😛 But my luck was not about the pizza. I got my chance to meet and talk with Bjarne Stroustrup, the father of C++ language! It was all began when all students joining the dinner had to meet up in...

Geek Stuffs / General Computer Science / VPS Story

VPS Experience (Part 1): Moving to VPS to Host Personal Blogs

So I decided to move my blog from shared hosting so VPS hosting. VPS is getting cheaper everyday with as low as $2 per day makes it a good bargain to host blog in VPS. With VPS, we can choose which software we want to install, and configure it in our own taste. But definitely, choosing VPS is not for everyone. It is more suitable for advanced user as configuring...

C++ / Geek Stuffs

Lesson learned: Do Not Store rvalue Reference Outlive its Declaration

I am building a custom operator overloading structures in C++, and was really seduced with what rvalue promises: the lifetime of rvalue reference is bound to the expression of its context. Rvalue references can be used to extend the lifetimes of temporary objects (cppreference.com) I was building a combination of operators which accepts a lot of literals and temporary objects including lambda. So for instance: auto res = ObjectA() *...