Matthew Nguyen

When Git Archive Trips Up Bazel

Sat, 05 Jul 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This was an issue that happened a couple of years ago while working at IMC. These are the leftovers of my notes, so apologies for some missing details / links.

I don’t have much Bazel experience, this is from the perspective as someone reponsible for maintaining an internal Gitlab repository while another team was working on a Bazel build pipeline.

Context

The brotli repository was forked in an internal Gitlab instance to serve as a local copy, and was being updated from upstream periodically.

Tracking down DNS issues

Sat, 21 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0000

This was a good experience on tracking down a DNS issue at IMC, when I had no practical network debugging experience.

tldr

try to get the network tuple to help diagnose general networking issues
nslookup / dig will get the DNS record for you
tcpdump can determine if network traffic is making it in / out of a server
traceroute / mtr will determine at which hop packets are getting dropped

The issue

It was noticed that cronjobs on a particular host were failing with DNS errors, and was intermittently unable to send requests:

Trials & Tribulations of Tracking Michael Reeves' uploads

Sat, 22 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Hi, it’s been awhile since I last wrote about something. I recently created a timer to track how long it’s been since Michael Reeves last uploaded, since the time of writing it’s been at least 9 months now. Of course, I love his content and it’s been a real inspiration for me.

Here’s the original explanation for the process I went through in making this website

link to the website

The making of Valorant Throws

Sun, 27 Sep 2020 00:00:00 +0000

This will give an insight into how I came to solve a problem I was having as of late.

Click here to go to the website!

The Problem

Valorant came out and I was absolutely obsessed with it. It’s a 5v5 tactical shooter similar to Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (or CS:GO for short).

Valorant, like CS:GO, has the capacity to throw grenades across the map to set up strategies and gain an advantage by blocking vision or damaging enemies. The major difference was that in Valorant, each character (otherwise called agents) each had their own unique abilities - everyone in CS:GO had access to the same types of grenades.

Learning From Project 0 in Algorithms & Data Structures

Sat, 11 Apr 2020 12:00:00 +0000

This project was meant to be a sort of “refresher” or opportunity for students to assess their knowledge obtained from the prerequisite class, but I did not feel like I was prepared for this at all.

I won’t be saying what exactly the prompt was for this project, but essentially it was to recreate the String class in C++. Seems easy enough, right?

No, you were so wrong.

After finishing this project, here’s what I learned:

Object Oriented Programming

Tue, 28 Jan 2020 23:00:00 +0000

In this post, I’ll be giving a quick primer on Object Oriented Programming or OOP.

This explanation will be using Python - each programming language has its own nuances and syntax for the various things explained in here.

Base Definitions and Knowledge

Objects -> essentially the same definition as a regular object, an entity that can be acted upon

Classes -> these are the blueprints for objects – these are referred to when creating a new object

HTML tutorial for the complete beginner

Mon, 08 Jul 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Here, we’ll be covering the basics of HTML straight from scratch, for those who are just beginning to learn about it.

Special shoutout to 2019 Curry TIP for prompting me to make this guide, hopefully ya’ll find this useful and informative.

Getting Set Up

Here’s what you’ll need to get started on using HTML:

a text editor - I recommend using Brackets, but you can use any, even notepad would work.
a web browser - of course you have this, how else would you be viewing this guide? For this guide I’ll be using Google Chrome, but if you use some other browser like Firefox or Safari if you wanted to but why would you use those, Google Chrome is soooo much better. I highly recommend using Google Chrome, as it is really helpful and makes Brackets so much better (you’ll see later).

NOTE: This is under the assumption that you will be only working locally, you will need to download/use any software to manage files remotely (meaning on another computer that’s not on your own).

It’s best if you had a folder that you did all your work on, so you can create a folder on your desktop and name it something like the bestest most amazing work I have ever done in my life DO NOT TOUCH. Or you can just call it html tutorial if you don’t want to embarrass yourself when someone sees your desktop.

What is polymorphism?

Mon, 24 Jun 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Polymorphism is considered an important part of OOP (Object Oriented Programming), and understanding/using it/explaining it will definitely be useful in the future.

Disclaimer: Honestly more than anything, this is for my own benefit so I am able to explain these concepts accurately and easily.

Definition

A quick Google search brings up this:

the ability of an object to take up many forms

Dynamic Polymorphism

In a class hierarchy, many objects share a common method or trait, but have different behaviors associated with each subclasses’ method or trait.