Chaoming's Blog – Tech and History

16 July, 2019

Automate Deployments to Multiple App Engine Environments with Cloud Build and GitHub

If you want to securely automate deployments of your App Engine application to multiple environments such as staging and production with a simple Git commit or a pull request, this article will outline the steps for you. Why You Should Do This: Good reasons to automate the deployment process are: Reduce the impact of human error on a deployment Improve...

Coding Comments: 0

24 May, 2019

How to Install Custom SSL Certificate on Google Cloud Platform

I recently installed custom SSL certificates in Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for both App Engine and load balancer (used by CDN and Computer Engine). Here is the step by step guide how it’s done. I hope this will help you to go through the process. Generating a certificate signing request To get a certificate, firstly, you need to generate a...

Coding Comments: 0

17 December, 2018

How to Use Docker for Go App Engine Development and Deploy to Standard Environment

App Engine is great but if you are using Docker, you can only use Flexible Environment which is not what I want as I would love to continue to use Standard Environment. Here is a comparison of the two environments. My goal is to use Docker for development only. When the app is deployed, it will still be deployed...

Coding Comments: 0

13 July, 2018

Documentatory Review: The Vietnam War

Recently I finished watching a documentary, The Vietnam War, on Netflix. This is one of the best war documentaries I have ever watched, I have to say. It covers both how the decisions were made in the governments, as well as the experience of soldiers and civilians from all sides. It is a fairly long documentary, about 20 hours long,...

History Comments: 0

30 March, 2018

Joining Partitioned Tables to Create Views in BigQuery

BigQuery date partitioned tables can limit the data scan by partitions to help keep the query cost low and improve query performance. However, Google’s documents do not give much clue how to use partitioned tables to create views that support partition queries. I did some research and found the way to do it, even with views that are created from...

Coding Comments: 0

26 March, 2018

Guess How Many Advertisers Facebook Sold Your Contact To?

Update: After posting this article, a friend from Facebook pointed out that the list of advertisers is companies provided personal info to match my Facebook info to run targeted campaigns, instead of Facebook giving away the contact info to these companies. However, I see companies I have never heard of and they are not in Australia from some quick Google...

Martech Comments: 0

20 February, 2018

Build Your Own Web Analytics Platform in 25 Minutes

Update: Just to clarify, Insightech is built in totally different architecture and it is way more complex than this. I gave a presentation in MeasureCamp Melbourne, and the topic was “Build Your Own Web Analytics Platform in 25 Minutes”. In MeasureCamp, each session has 25 minutes presentation time, that’s where the 25 minutes in the topic from. What inspired me...

Coding Comments: 7

22 January, 2018

Another Poor Ads Experience That Frustrated Me

You may already notice that these days, after you look at a product on a website, you start to see the product in ads everywhere. This is called remarketing. It is a very common marketing technique being used to sell a product that you are probably interested in, or even already purchased. To me, if you show me ads about...

Martech Comments: 0

15 January, 2018

Python Voice Assistant Source Code

Back in mid-2015, I created my first and only Python script so far. The script was a voice assistant. I thought I lost the source code, but it’s been in my Dropbox all the time and was named with a weird project name so I didn’t realise that’s it. I just didn’t try to look for it hard enough. Here...

Coding Comments: 0

8 January, 2018

New Start, Building a Web Analytics Time Machine

Today is my last day at IAG, the place I worked in the last 5 years. Initially, I was planning to work there for 6 months as a contractor to help them enhance the web analytics capability, and then to start to do my own thing. But it turns out I stayed there for 5 years, contracting for almost 2.5...

Entrepreneur Comment: 1