Vietnam

Facebook block in Vietnam May 2016

tomo — Sun, 15 May 2016 14:23:30 +0000

Is Facebook blocked in Vietnam right now? Over the past few years, the main ISPs and mobile operators in Vietnam either stopped blocking Facebook or only lightly blocked it (with easy workarounds). Earlier in the rise of Facebook maybe some officials thought it was feasible that the Facebook social network could be prevented from taking hold. Today it's quite clear that it already has.

The Facebook block happening in May 2016 also affects other Facebook properties/apps like Facebook Messenger and Instagram. This also breaks any websites which require Facebook to login.

I'm not in Vietnam currently, but I've had many friends there talk to me about the situation over the past few days. A lot of people on both Facebook and other social networks (like Zalo in Vietnam) are complaining about not being able to access Facebook but most of them are not talking about or questioning the reasons why it might be blocked now.

Since I'm not able to test the network conditions of Vietnam myself, I've heard from some friends in tech in Vietnam. At first, mobile operators VNPT and Viettel started blocking Facebook, but now other major ISPs such as FPT have joined the internet blockade. Whereas in the past a ban on Facebook simply meant that DNS requests for the facebook.com domain would fail, which could be easily circumvented using a non-broken DNS server such as Google's public DNS servers (8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4), this is no longer the case in Vietnam now.

Like in China, where not only Facebook but hundreds of American news and social media sites are blocked, the solution to a "firewall" blocking a particular website from your location is to use a VPN or a proxy server.

VPNs and proxies allow you to "masqueride" your originating IP address and to bounce around the firewall. You connect to the VPN or proxy server, which isn't banned (yet), and then from there you can freely connect to any other site as usual. The censors just think you're connecting to a normal website and let the traffic through.

Which VPN to use? Fortunately, there are a lot of VPN options, both free and paid. On your phone, you can find VPN apps listed in the app store or Google Play store. Some work on desktop as well, such as Betternet.co (google it).

The alternative to VPNs is web proxies (SOCKS or web). You can find lists of web proxies or use this one from HideMyAss. With these, you configure your browser's network settings to use a proxy and set the IP address and port which you found in a list.

You can also search the Chrome Web Store for proxy and VPN Chrome extensions which will simplify the process as well.

How ignoring feedback hurts Vietnamese businesses

tomo — Wed, 24 Feb 2016 06:29:45 +0000

Every "system" is made up of parts which are connected and have relations with each other. In order for the parts and the system as a whole to gain benefit from these relationships, the system needs for there to be feedback mechanisms from one component to another. Your body's hip is aware when your foot makes contact with a football, through signals passing through your brain and without the proper functioning of the routing of these signals you would blindly miss the ball and keel over instead. Organizations of people are no different. And a business is just a component in a system whose other constituents include the customers (and also include constituents like shareholders and employees or executive staff). Without effective feedback looping from customer to business owner and back, businesses will lose their initial momentum and then flounder and eventually fail. Imagine a bicycle rider who is pushed into motion by a friend but who then has to take over control of direction, speed, and angle. Without quick and accurate communication from your pedaling feet to your equilibrium sensors in your ears to the visual processing through your eyeballs - if any of these sensory data flows is cut, the rider will eventually tumble over. Keeping a business upright and moving forward is like keeping a bicycle upright and moving forward. When this process is failing, even though customers lose when and while this is happening, given a market of choices (another effective ecosystem component), the customer moves on away from the lost, confused, or stunted business.

For a concrete example, let's imagine a typical journey to a restaurant in Vietnam. Food is a typical small enterprise here, given the low barriers to entry compared to other types of business, giving foreigners an impression of how entrepreneurial Vietnamese are. But among the myriad of food & beverage businesses which start up in Vietnam, the vast majority close prematurely for what I think are preventable reasons knowable ahead of time. At least some of these reasons relate to restricted flows of feedback.

1. You are walking down a local street and enter a local restaurant. You know nothing about it except that it's near you right now.

Did someone notice you entering? No, not this time. The arrival of a potential real customer was not acknowledged. There is a lack of situational awareness among the staff. [I have sometimes sat down at a restaurant and then left after a few minutes without anybody offering to accept my money in exchange for a meal. When an entrepreneur is paying for those potential customers to walk in the door without buying anything, they are losing money on each non-customer.]

I don't blame only the staff for being ignorant. That behavior is enabled by a society that doesn't expect more.

2. You end up ordering some dishes. A starter, a main, a drink. Your first choices are all unavailable. You try again, but your second choices are also not for sale today (or any day). Whoever created this menu was dreaming big. But a million customers could try ordering an unavailable dish without the store owner ever knowing about this demand. Why? Because the staff will never relay those failed requests up to someone who can take action, the low level staff themselves being completely powerless in this typical hierarchy.

Anyways, you end up ordering less than you would have if the menu was accurate and up to date. The alternative: knowing what your customers desire and giving it to them.

3. Your order arrives. Hopefully, there wasn't a mistake due to miscommunication and lack of confirming your order carefully. If there was a misunderstanding, who pays for the mistake? The staff will argue with the customer to make the customer pay. If not, the employee pays. For that meal, the business owner didn't lose money. But would you ever come back? No, but you leave the owner wondering why not.

Realize, though, this waitress's role here in the business is not to provide good customer service, at least the incentive system isn't there. In the American tipping system, the carrot/stick of nice/no tips is supposed to translate into attentive service from your wait staff. In Vietnam, wait staff are treated like dogs, paid little, and rarely receive tips. There's often little trust between employee and boss. Often, employees are stealing from their employers who don't know the real number of transactions taking place.

Tomorrow, you end up getting food poisoning from this meal. This case will not bubble up back to the wait staff who was picking her nose, or to the kitchen staff who wasn't properly washing anything, or to the owner who never wanted this to happen but who will regardless not be getting repeat business due to the lack of quality control. Without effective feedback, the problem of poor sanitation continues, as will any unexamined pathology. But who wants to be the receiver of bad feedback? On a personal leve, who wants to hear that they are doing a poor job?

Rules for incentives also effectively serve as feedback. Shareholders benefit directly when a business is successful and employees should too. Shareholders aren't at the point of transaction as it's happening and can't influence the transaction. Responsibility is left to the wait staff to assess customer feedback and use it before it's too late to benefit from the transaction.

4. Finally, you are ready to leave. You haven't paid yet. Is someone willing to take your money? No, again a lack of situational awareness. Not paying attention to customers. You will have to yell to get someone's attention. Subtler cues from customers are lost to the ether. These unobserved flows of information are an opportunity for capturing a competitive advantage, but remain only the potential for such. Business owners are already fighting the known unknowns. In the meantime, they can be taken down by the "unknown unknowns".

You, as a customer, will not trust the ability of your waitress to accurately calculate your bill. So you will scrutinize it for inevitable mistakes of overcharging. These mistakes are completely accepted without any mechanism which would discourage them in the form of punishment. Instead, the carrot of receiving money for unsold goods subtly encourages the practice to continue.

At this point, your waitress takes away your unused wet disposable towelettes in case you now decide to use them without paying for them. These are the final impressions the customer takes away from their dining experience.

5. Finally, you leave. How was your meal? Who knows. Was there anything else you would have wanted to order today? Data left uncollected. Will you come back again? Time may tell, but by then the restaurant or cafe or shop or whatever business it is which isn't openly collecting and responding to feedback from customers is already closed - after only being open for a few months.

The above scenario doesn't play out every time you eat in Vietnam. But outsiders who have been eating out in Vietnam for a few weeks should be familiar with all of these typical situations. Food business is something that foreigners have the most time interfacing with in Vietnam, unless they move deeper into the society. It is hubris for a restaurateur to believe they know how their customers feel without asking them. But the same problem of ignoring constituent feedback exists throughout the culture of all organizations. First, organizations need to have an awareness of what's going on. Then, they need to implement mechanisms for collecting feedback data (many points of it). And let the customer know their feedback is being acknowledged. Finally, this data needs to feed back into business operations. The end goal is to see the cycle repeat and to see customer feedback improve over time.

Chiang Mai vs Saigon (for digital nomads / expats)

tomo — Wed, 06 Jan 2016 05:07:46 +0000

[Preface: 4 years ago I wrote about bootstrapping startups from Vietnam and in recent years we've seen waves of "digital nomads" settling down in Vietnam. The situation for startups in particular in Vietnam has developed rapidly since but it's still a good base for "bootstrappers". The following is one long-term Vietnam expat's view on another trendy digital nomad hotspot.]

Have you heard? Chiang Mai, a city in the north of Thailand, is a top destination for digital nomads. What's a digital nomad? It's those people you see sitting in cafes all day with MacBooks. There are thousands of them in Saigon, at thousands of cafes throughout the city, but mostly around District 1.

When you've been hanging around Bangkok or Saigon, you'll find that Chiang Mai is much quieter. Peaceful. The honking has stopped, and you have space. There's a lot less going on here. And all the travel agencies are encouraging you to trek outside the city where there's even less. This is a small provincial outpost, not a cosmopolitan regional economic hub. But it draws in a ton of tourists.

The heart of the city is the square-shaped Old City, surrounded by a moat, which is still filled with standing water. This area is full of guesthouses and hotels and places for backpackers and tourists to hang out and get their backs rubbed. There are a number of streets in Chiang Mai which could be called "massage districts" due to almost every shop being a massage shop - 100 baht for 30 minutes, 200 baht for an hour. Massage may be the city's main industry. The city as a whole shuts down early, including the Old City. It's the complete opposite of Bangkok's Khaosan Road. But the masseuses stay open until the last bars close. Walking Street is full of white people laying in chairs on the sidewalk getting rubbed down by Thai people until midnight.

Contrast this with Saigon. Saigon is the kind of city that stays up late. There's always someplace to go eat and drink that's open. It's loud and noisy. You can get your massages here too but the masseuses will always be young women, not the aunties (or grannies or sometimes even male masseurs) who pull your limbs in Chiang Mai. So Chiang Mai is good for saving money by not going out, and maybe not dating local women.

Cafes with wifi, air conditioning, power outlets. And coffee. This is the natural habitat of the digital nomad. Chiang Mai's cafes are clustered in the Nimmanhemin / Nimmanheminda neighborhood outside of the Old City. This is a trendy area with shopping and trendy eateries as well as a handful of cafes. It's not a big neighborhood, but it's outside of the tourist circuit. Chiang Mai has a more artsy feel to it per capita / square meter compared to Vietnamese cities, and this street is a mix of hipster and yuppy, although such concepts just don't really apply in Southeast Asia.

But another great hangout spot (for white people) in CM with a similar creative-consumption vibe is Ploen Ruedee Night Market, "international food park", by the night market / bazaar. But it and the whole area are closed / dead on Sundays.

I've gotten used to cafes in Saigon having a certain standard of size to accommodate lots of customers, availability of power outlets, free iced tea, and fuss-free wifi. And there are more cafes in Saigon which fit this bill than any other city in Southeast Asia. For people settling in Chiang Mai's Nimmanhemin neighborhood and seeking cafes, it's not hard to find one. But they will be smaller and easily already full, or won't have any power outlets (this is common), or the wifi will be limited. Saigon has more quantity and variety when it comes to cafe styles.

Internet speeds in Chiang Mai can be decent. But a lot of the wireless networks have problems - being oversubscribed, being owned by telecom providers and requiring a subscription from them, being free to guests but only for an hour or two, and you'll only be able to connect to wifi with one device instead of both your laptop and your phone, etc. As cutthroat as Vietnamese businesses are, Saigon wifi providers aren't sophisticated enough to make you pay to access them, ever. A lot of Chiang Mai wifi networks are open as in unencrypted, whereas almost all wifi in Saigon will use WPA, just no login. As a consumer, you don't want to access wifi networks which are open but require logging in with an account tied to your passport or phone number.

Chiang Mai has a few coworking spaces. For digital nomad noobs and gurus alike. Here you'll find community. Chiang Mai has a small fraction of the population of Bangkok or Saigon. If you "nomad" here, your community will be people just like you, not local people. While Vietnam and Saigon in particular has a community and ecosystem of internet / technology professionals who are not nomads, Chiang Mai does not. Saigon has "real" expats, people sent there by multinational corporations to work there, as well as all the smaller companies who still need or desire to hire foreigners (and not just for teaching English). Saigon is economically diverse, providing both access to a workforce with skills which a business may need, as well as being a market for selling services to. If you are developing products and need developers or marketers you can hire from the millions of young people working in Ho Chi Minh City, and their salary will be affordable to bootstrapping startups. You might even meet investors who fund your project in Saigon. Chiang Mai is more like a resort for internet forum dudes, some who are "killing it" and others who have no idea what they're doing but are keen on experience "Southeast Asia lite". Also, apparently working at Chiang Mai coworking spaces puts you at risk of being rounded up by the immigration police who have recently raided them looking for foreigners working on tourist visas.

There is no "digital nomad visa". And most of us aren't eligible for work visas. Visas are an issue, but the visa situation is better for Westerners in Vietnam than in Thailand. People are frequently denied visas to Thailand which is rare for visitors to Vietnam, although you need to arrange a tourist visa (3 months) before you arrive in Vietnam instead of upon arrival. There are agencies in Chiang Mai explicitly advertising "visa run" services, which you'll have to do after 30 days or so. They take you by bus to a bordering country - Myanmar or Laos. You might be refused at the border returning to Thailand for staying there too long. Thai immigration might deny people who've done multiple consecutive visa runs. Vietnam, despite its bureaucracies and unclear regulations, is much more certain and easier in this regard with no requirement to stay outside the country for months before being allowed back in.

But Thai people are pleasant and friendly. It's the Land of Smiles. Vietnamese people can learn a lot from Thais about attracting global tourists by providing better customer service instead of turning them off through rude behavior (which the Vietnamese person won't realize is rude) and through blatant overcharging or scams. I can't emphasize enough how nice and not rude Thai people are (generalizing). Thai people know how to queue.

Saigon is no nomad paradise. But it still manages to attract all kinds of people who stay for a long time. There are various communities and it's still really cheap. Living here is comfortable. Chiang Mai is also a comfortable place for new nomads. It's open to newbies, and is an "Asia-lite" compared to the edgier environment of Saigon. The digital nomad to local population ratio is quite high. There are more options for employment, entertainment / nightlife, dating, events, diaspora communities, etc. in Saigon, but more choice can also be confusing or distracting. Saigon can be more stressful whereas Chiang Mai promotes stress relief in its scenery, less hectic traffic, and massages. Chiang Mai can be a few degrees less hot compared to the hottest times in lower altitudes. Does "digital nomad" define who you are? Do you need to be a member of a digital nomad community above all other concerns? Then maybe Chiang Mai is sufficient. If you seek more, and want to be exposed to variety, insanity, and unexpected things daily, then start discovering Saigon.

Some other comments:
1. Chiang Mai is a clean city, but there are random poop smells. Saigon has random urine smells (where guys pee on the street).
2. Chiang Mai has an uncomfortable "burning season" from February til April when the air is full of smoke from fires in the surrounding farmland and people leave the city. The smoke in the air is so bad that there are days the planes can't fly in Chiang Mai causing the airport to shut down and stranding anyone trying to leave, so it's best to stay out for that season.
3. Thailand uses Thai script to write their language, a script similar to Khmer, but undecipherable to most foreigners. Signs are often not translated into English. Chiang Mai street names are hard to find. Vietnam is the opposite in that even Vietnamese names can be written and read (letter by letter) by foreigners and every building on every street has its address marked outside making it easy to always know where you are (this mostly works).
4. Chiang Mai is a small and compact city, but increasingly full of cars. The traffic isn't too bad yet but can still back up at intersections. There is basically no bus system or public transit, besides individual trucks. There are also few taxis (making it unreasonable to hail one on the street) but many tuk-tuks.

My Vietnam Startup Report

tomo — Fri, 06 Sep 2013 08:43:49 +0000

Last Wednesday night, @Bowei Gai of the World Startup Report made his stop on his year-long globetrotting tour to the center of the Vietnamese startup scene at Saigon Hub in Ho Chi Minh City. He gave a talk that had been honed over many months and included lots of interesting bits from startup scenes around the world, from the amazing size (trillions!) of Chinese e-commerce companies, to the equally impressive adoption of mobile payment in Sub-Saharan African countries (30%!). Later, in private, we heard of the incredible arrogance of French startup people and corruption around the world. But we were also humbled by the recent multiple-hundreds of million dollar exits of Nepalese technology companies. And perhaps secretly identified with the conditions of economic crisis under which Argentinean entrepreneurs had to run their businesses - 20+% annual inflation driving up business costs, a local currency constantly losing value leading locals to buy dollars when they could...

Bowei has been flying to a new country every few days to study a brand new local startup scene. Originally with the intention of writing up the local report as he was traveling, that was clearly impossible. And so it'll be at least a few months before we see his Vietnam Startup Report. So let me share my own thoughts while they're still fresh.

On Vietnam banning chat apps

tomo — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 10:30:21 +0000

Here are some random thoughts on the news of Vietnamese ISPs/ministries colluding to ban mobile chat apps like Line/KakaoTalk/Viber/Whatsapp. The story so far has been that Vietnam's mobile networks, losing more and more money from people using free chat apps instead of SMS (which senders pay a little money for in Vietnam) which is pure profit for them, would like to put a stop to this trend.

Learning Spanish in Ho Chi Minh City

tomo — Wed, 28 Aug 2013 04:23:40 +0000

I've had several friends ask me where they can learn Spanish in Ho Chi Minh City, especially since the University of Social Sciences and Humanities canceled their Spanish language course. There aren't that many people who want to learn or speak Spanish in Vietnam since there is less trade between Vietnam and Spanish-speaking countries (compared to Japanese, Korean, Chinese) but it's a hobby for some.

My friend let me know about an open course at her Spanish school:

The school is called Jaleo (Escuela de Espanol) in Phu Nhuan district at 38 Hoa Su Street, Ward 12, Phu Nhuan - near Phan Xich Long street. Telephone: 08 3517 1288 or you can call 01649922169.

They have a basic class starting September 5th on Mondays and Wednesdays from 6:30-8:00PM. The 8 week course is 2.4 million. Other courses are listed on their website.

The teachers are native Spanish speakers.

Besides Spanish language they also have courses on Spanish/Latin American culture and also do private tutoring. Basically, it's a small operation from people who want to make Spanish teaching possible in Vietnam, not a big corporate language center. Open to both Vietnamese and expats.

Hacking Your First Hackathon

tomo — Sat, 08 Jun 2013 07:13:49 +0000

Today I'll be speaking, mentoring, then judging at Keewi's Hack Day event.

Over a decade ago I joined a group of "hackers" in developing an open source ultra-secure UNIX operating system called OpenBSD. As the most secure OS in the world, it was designed to keep out hackers, as in crackers, those seeking unauthorized access to computer systems. But we were also hackers, a type of "artisanal" programmer. OpenBSD hackers are spread across the world and they gather themselves together periodically into one place to be super productive on a common goal over the course of several days. OpenBSD invented the hackathon, even coining the word itself.

I attended my first hackathon back when I was still in school, which I graduated from over 10 years ago. It was organized by our university's open source club, the only extracurricular activity I was involved in. We got permission to use one of the classrooms overnight and even got funding to buy a couple pizzas and pop. That was it. There were no corporate sponsors. There were no spectators watching us code except for our confused girlfriends. There were no headhunters or suits looking for geeks they could make use of. And there was no prize money because we were just there to see what hacks we could pull off in a night and then show each other.

Nowadays, hackathons are more and more common and are seen by corporations as something they can take advantage of.

Entrepreneurs everywhere: Surveying the startup scene in Vietnam

tomo — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 05:03:10 +0000

[Are you an investor interested in investing in Vietnam, especially in startups? This blog post comes from conversations with visiting investors from other countries and answering a lot of questions they had in common.]

For years, tech startups in Vietnam operated in a sort of vacuum, with no local ecosystem to help them.

Of course, this didn't stop them. Maybe there were even benefits with less scene distractions.

Now there is something we can call a scene, like a subculture of startup. There are wannabe entrepreneurs (wantrepreneurs), kids who dream of startups or want to experience working for one. There are serial events (Startup Weekend Ho Chi Minh City, the Start Me Up series, even Barcamp Saigon which I'm most personally attached to) as well as larger traditional conferences with international involvement. There are hackathons. There are training programs. There are incubators. There are angels and venture capitalists, although so few that finding appropriate investment among them is challenging for many reasons. There are online forums (in Vietnamese) and there is now coverage of the country in the three largest regional tech news journals out of Singapore (e27, SGE, TechInAsia) as well as local PR mouthpiece Action.vn.

And there are even some startups within Vietnam's startup scene!

(Though there is confusion about what is or isn't a startup)

What kind of startups you'll find in Vietnam

Start your startup in Kansas City, or Vietnam

tomo — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 06:02:38 +0000

Boulder's big VC investor dude Brad Feld has a house in Kansas City now. He doesn't live there, even for just part of the year, but he owns it. He's letting YOU live there. For free. FREE!!! But should you live in Kansas City (a mid-sized town in the American southwest midwestern state of Missouri) to bootstrap your startup? If the rent is free?

Awhile back I talked about bootstrapping your startup in Ho Chi Minh City on the cheap. And what's better than cheap besides free?

A Foreigner in Vietnam During Tet

tomo — Fri, 01 Feb 2013 06:52:38 +0000

A Quiet American in a Quiet Vietnam

About two weeks after I first arrived in Saigon, it began: Tet. What a horrible mistake, being in Vietnam right at that time! Tet, being the single Vietnamese holiday that is equivalent to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year in one long week that often stretches to a month for many students as well as laborours. While pre-Tet is a time of high commercial activity, it all comes to a full stop at midnight of the Lunar New Year. Vietnamese people go home. And for Saigon's 10 million or so population, this mostly means going back to places far from metropolitan Ho Chi Minh City. Vietnamese cities are full of economic migrants, young people coming as students or looking for jobs so they can earn money to send home. And Tet is the time of the year, for most economic migrants it's the one and only time of the year, when they return home to their families.

As a company or factory, you don't expect anyone to work during the days of Tet. It doesn't matter if you're a foreign company with orders from foreign countries that need to be filled, by customers that neither know nor care that a "Tet" is happening. If you're lucky, your employees will come back to work after a week, after you've paid them a "13th month" Tet bonus, often equivalent to one month's salary.

Vung Tau Travel Basics - From Ho Chi Minh City

tomo — Tue, 29 Jan 2013 17:55:46 +0000

Any important city on the planet exists either because it was a port on the sea or was at a strategic point on a river. Few historic cities exist in the middle of deserts or forests not near any major water sources. Saigon is a river town not a seaside town. It lies near the mouth of the mighty Mekong River, but still some distance from the ocean. But for most of history, being on a strategic trade route was more important to a city's growth than being by a nice beach. Most cities worldwide therefore aren't built around beach resorts nor was being a scenic beach a big economic draw until recent decades.

And so, from time to time, when the residents of Ho Chi Minh City want to get away to the beach the closest option for them would be Vung Tau, a small seaside town that was also a popular R&R destination for American troops stationed in Saigon during the Vietnam War. It has changed a lot since then.

Getting from Saigon to Vung Tau

From downtown Saigon, one can take a water taxi/hydrofoil to central Vung Tau City in just 90 minutes or less.

Christmas in Vietnam

tomo — Wed, 26 Dec 2012 09:15:43 +0000

Christmas in Vietnam is stressful. Just kidding. The downtown streets of Saigon get pretty packed as young people crowd in for the various photo opportunities on Le Loi and Nguyen Hue streets. And the whole area around Diamond Plaza and Notre Dame Cathedral is packed right up until Christmas Eve at midnight. Christmas in Vietnam actually ends right after it becomes December 25th. Christmas in Vietnam means Christmas Eve!

One nice thing about celebrating Christmas in Vietnam is that there's no pressure to do Christmas shopping. Forget Black Friday or Cyber Monday. And forget Boxing Day. Buy a gift for somebody if you want. But only do so because you want to, not because you feel obligated, because you expect they will buy you a gift. Because they probably won't.

Only one in 10 Vietnamese people are Christian, although that makes it one of the more Christian Asian countries. So why do you see Christmas decorations everywhere? Why are there giang Christmas trees downtown and Christmas lights hanging all over stores (to be fair, those lights often stay up year round).

Like Halloween and other Western holidays, Christmas is celebrated more and more as Vietnam is more exposed to Western culture. But it's been celebrated in the country for a long time actually. During South Vietnam's brief existence as a Catholic nation, with a war ongoing, it was celebrated. After the war's conclusion, Vietnam, including former South Vietnam and Saigon were impoverished as a result of poor economic policies. There was not much celebration of any kind. Only until after Doi Moi (return to capitalism) did people have money to celebrate things like Christmas again. Nowadays, at least in the cities, young people party in the streets without much care. Celebrating Christmas means going to Mass for Christians and just going outside with friends for everyone else. There might be some drinking and eating (nhau) to go along but you won't find turkey or other traditional Western Christmas dishes.

So there you have it. Christmas in Vietnam comes and goes. People still go to work on the 25th and there's not much to look forward to on New Years either. The big holiday here is Tet, the Lunar New Year.

Code Retreat 2012 - Ho Chi Minh City

tomo — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 10:08:54 +0000

On Saturday December 8th, Ho Chi Minh City along with 200 other cities around the world celebrated a global Code Retreat.

What is a code retreat?

Like a meditation retreat, a code retreat is a time set aside to step out of the daily life and routine in order to get deep into practice. It's a full work day, and everyone attending is giving up their Saturday to do what they are probably paid to do from Monday to Friday. That's dedication to the craft. Not so many people came, partly due to poor advertising.

The code retreat was open to anyone but all attendees were fellow programmers, those with some experience already but who want to improve themselves. Besides myself, there was a motley crew of foreigners - an organizer from Japan, a local software tycoon originally from Spain, a Czech developer. Otherwise, all Vietnamese, including startup developers, university faculty, students, and corporate workers.

The venue was ERC Vietnam, the Singaporean MBA school who, along with two other Singaporean schools in Vietnam, is rumored to have lost its operating license from the Ministry of Education which would force it to close. However, the school was still open as usual. A Toastmasters club was also meeting in the room across the hall. There were scheduled outings for students posted in the elevators to be held at local bars and restaurants.

The coding

There were six sessions lasting about an hour each throughout the day and each session was the same both in format and content. The format was:

15 minutes - pair up with another programmer and discuss the strategy for writing the program - choose a language, maybe a framework, discuss data structures and algorithms
15 minutes - one person "drives" the keyboard, the other "navigates" - pair programming (an extreme programming methodology) where two developers use a single laptop to collaboratively develop software
15 minutes - switch up driver and navigator, although often times only a single person was familiar with the text editor or developing environment or even language and API (some languages heavily depend on libraries and APIs to do simple tasks which are difficult to do in the core language alone)
15 minutes - retrospective and break - we wrote down our learnings on sticky notes and collected them for each other to read and at the end of the day we had a whole day retrospective

What were we writing?

We were implementing Conway's Game of Life. Each pair (each session we picked new partners) wrote the game six times throughout the day, erasing the code they had written at the end of each session. The goal was not to write the game of life, but to get better at writing code by writing the same code over and over, by developing the same software over and over.

Halfway through the day some rules started to be added. First, we had to use TDD (test driven development) methodology (which some people didn't realize was feasible in JavaScript), then OOP (what if someone had chosen Scheme or some other functional language?). This was to encourage us to try new techniques and learn them from each other.

I was an outlier in that I wanted to use languages like Python, JavaScript, or even PHP instead of .Net framework languages. Instead of a massive IDE I was using Vim. In the end, in each session where it was up to me I chose Javascript. There was no need to build a new project from a template and then compile executables before running them. Just open a text file, save as html, and use Chrome as a development environment.

Later, more rules were imposed:
No if statements.
No loops (for, while, etc.).
No functions longer than a few lines (maybe 3 or 5 statements max).

We were encouraged to pick one rule and try to work within its constraints. I decided to apply all the rules!

These rules would be easy to abide by using a functional programming language but they're not impossible to follow in Python or Javascript either. But to replace loops using recursion, one thing I found was that nobody remembered how to write recursive functions and most people didn't even want to try as it was hurting their heads.

After the day was over, I took a look at underscore.js, a utility library for JavaScript which makes functional-like programming in JavaScript much easier.

Here's what I came up with.

<script src="underscore.js"></script>
<script>
 
// row and col are indices into 2d array 'grid', either 'today' or 'tomorrow'
function value(grid, row, col) { return (_.isUndefined(grid[row]) || _.isUndefined(grid[row][col])) ? 0 : grid[row][col]; }
function count_neighbors(grid, row, col) {
    return value(grid, row-1, col-1) + value(grid, row-1, col) + value(grid, row-1, col+1) +
           value(grid, row  , col-1) +                           value(grid, row  , col+1) +
           value(grid, row+1, col-1) + value(grid, row+1, col) + value(grid, row+1, col+1);
}
function next_state_if(neighbors, state) { return (neighbors == 3) ? 1 : ((neighbors == 2) ? state : 0); }
function next_state(grid, row, col) { return next_state_if(count_neighbors(grid, row, col), grid[row][col]); }
function calculate_tomorrow(today, tomorrow) {
    _.each(today, function (foo, row) {
        _.each(this.today[row], function (foo, col) { this.tomorrow[row][col] = next_state(this.today, row, col); }, this);
    }, {today: today, tomorrow: tomorrow});
}
 
// helpers
function copy2d(ary2d) { return _.map(ary2d, function (list) { return list.slice(); }); }
function print_r(ary2d) { console.log(_.map(ary2d, function (list) { return list.join(''); }).join('\n')); }
function random_init() { return _.map(_.range(30), function (list) { return _.map(_.range(30), function (list) { return _.random(1); }); }); }
 
// demo main loop
var today = random_init();
var tomorrow = random_init();
print_r(today);
setInterval(function(){
    calculate_tomorrow(today, tomorrow);
    print_r(tomorrow);
    today = copy2d(tomorrow);
}, 400);
</script>

Facebook via SMS in Vietnam - Viettel

tomo — Sat, 08 Dec 2012 01:51:16 +0000

Viettel, Vietnam's military-owned telecom, has opened up direct Facebook integration via sms to Viettel mobile phone subscribers. This is an officially supported way for Vietnamese people to access Facebook on the go without a computer or smartphone. This is targeting Vietnamese people who mainly access the internet at internet cafes and so using this they won't need to hang around at cafes where they're charged hourly while they wait for someone to comment or like their status updates. This applies to a lot of Vietnamese folks and could lead to even faster adoption of Vietnam's #1 social network. What does that imply about any official government ban on Facebook?

10 Days of Sitting: Vipassana Meditation in Vietnam

tomo — Sat, 17 Nov 2012 06:53:02 +0000

From the October 31st to November 11th I attended a Vipassana meditation course/retreat on the outskirts of Ho Chi Minh City.

On the fourth day, we got to eat: yogurt. I was so happy that day.