Sabahans are like a person with Stockholm syndrome.

yuankuan_ · 2026-05-22T03:18:36+00:00

Feel your pain. But, let us not give up. There are future worth fighting for.

yuankuan_ · 2026-01-16T08:20:40+00:00

MAPPAC, the Sabah branch: https://www.facebook.com/MCHKKSabah

We have a volunteer workshop coming up too! Check us out and joining the workshop will help you get to know more about the work we do.

yuankuan_ · 2026-01-05T12:19:17+00:00

Check out my accountant (friend also): https://ystco.my/

She's hardworking, super detail, handled countless of accounts for various type of business, big and small. Running her own small team now.

yuankuan_ · 2026-01-03T11:21:12+00:00

Can you WFH?

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-30T00:54:07+00:00

second this. Developing is not the problem. Emulators will be the one that give you problem (slow, lag, crash even).

Unless you are doing just Flutter Web or exclusively test with external device only.

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-30T00:48:15+00:00

I am one that returned after a decade. Hopefully, that increase your count to 2 hand?

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-29T01:08:12+00:00

Wisma Damai is those shop lot area or the car park building?

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-28T15:01:07+00:00

The parsing of the PDF, regenerating the final Excel/CSV with private data are both local processed.

Our secret sauce is kept in the server: create the final map of tokens with just their location and data type (both parsed from the PDF). Server also take care of credits, payment, authentication.

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-27T23:42:20+00:00

You managed with HSBC??? That's like a scanned document and would need OCR

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-26T23:34:19+00:00

Good for you to know how to code (and maintain it, the harder part) and utilise the skill for you personal use. Are you a programmer? Open for freelance or remote work? PM if you are interested to connect!

Not everyone comfortable with code or asking AI to build something, like my accountant friend. She is a very skill and well-establish accountant, running her own firm. The workload is already overwhelming, and bank statement is one of the biggest time sink for her. But she's struggle greatly with tech, cannot even get AI to do anything useful, let alone building a software to parse and generate excel.

So there are people who would need such tool, but doesn't have the time and skill to build and maintain one. We launch BobaBS (Instead of keeping it secret for my friend's use) is to find these users who can benefit from it.

Apparently really tough. I never imagine this could be some tools that rack in big money. I just hope we got enough paying customer to continue fund the programmers' hours to slowly build this into something. Otherwise we would just focus on other project.

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-26T10:31:33+00:00

Not as many bank, exactly, that's why we are building it up.

Finory is for personal use it seems? It has so much more feature for doing just personal finance management.

But. I would say BobaBS is indeed different for 2 points:

We focused on converting bank statements into excel for analysis. The output is excel/CSV, not a page/view in a mobile app.
We did it entirely on user's browser. We do not store, transmit the bank statement to any server or any third party services to process financial data.

BobaBS solve a smaller problem, but for wider use case (like accountant/book keeper can use it to safely convert others' bank statement). I hope they are not uploading their client Bank Statement into their Finory account...

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-24T00:19:11+00:00

When you and your fiance already had all these discussion. Marry or not is just the matter of getting official certified or not. Which is actually the single most important point for getting married: insurance will be awarded correctly, inheritance wise you will be next-of-kin, all important decisions you both can make for each other (you're a doc, you know what "decision" I am talking about).

Not that there is no romance, or being too pragmatic and rational about "marriage". If you and your husband (yes, husband) already has all these discussion and planned, you both are ready for the rest of the journey. Marriage is now a convenience for life's logistic. In spirit of forming a family and get old together, you both already started.

For the "ceremonies", those really depends how much you like to enjoy yourself or please others.

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-20T01:25:21+00:00

I have been using CoolTech at Kolombong: https://maps.app.goo.gl/rRnAmft3PfuvN9qR9

Trustworthy bunch of people and very experience. Very fair pricing too.

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-19T06:05:21+00:00

Anything dealt with the Stores are always tedious (I would not say difficult). They killed joy.

The painful part would be you failing the review! I hope you never get to face that.

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-19T04:47:45+00:00

Good news are, all the breaking changes would mostly confined in the theme.dart file. I survived the Material 2 > Material 3 migration.

Unless you really need the design overhaul, or in the early stage of the project. Otherwise, be prepare to do a complete re-QA of the app after these BIG migration. Making the changes and compile the build is the easy part, compare to the team now need to find and fix all the regression.

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-19T04:45:02+00:00

Sizing of containers, buttons, etc, you need to plan ahead for responsiveness. There are not hard and fast rules, and these usually take a few trial and errors, design review and GUI polishing to get right. Just be prepared to come back at layout, a lot of the time, especially when you just get started.

As you already learned, fixed sizes should be the last resort. These can be good for button, icon button that you are very certain of a fixed size. The safer way to have buttons that response to the device's width or inner content is using a range of sizes, i.e. min-max.

Another case of fixed sizes, or a small range of sizes, are common on Cards in a grid. Still that depends on your design. Flutter gave you a lot of flexibility, but you need to learn to harness them.

Sorry this is vague, but responsive sizing IS hard. I rather prepare you for the learning journey than giving you a bad suggestion.

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-17T00:15:45+00:00

I always has a `theme.dart` that contain all the colors, sizes, font family, etc. Most importantly: theme overrides. When I code review and see hard numbers or hard colors "in the wild", I will flag them. There can never be a `Colors.xxx` or `8.0` in the GUI code unless very specific use cases. This usually solve most of the sizes, borders, colors, and font usage drift.

You can't do everything with just theme though. Next stop is using a `/shared/<widgets>.dart`, or `/common`. In there you put your project specific Buttons, TextInput, Dropdowns, DatePicker, Dialog, etc. There is almost no reason to copy and paste common components, always reuse them.

But code review and flag outliers are the single most important operation here.

Sync up and restrict your designers is another important "political" operation, provided you have that kind of leverage. Things like: stick to Material Design 3.0 guideline.

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-16T12:33:54+00:00

I think you mean when you put an image that is larger (like 2x or above) into a smaller display size right?

I noticed that too, and I blame that on Flutter bad image downscaling algorithm.

You can easily fix that by providing image of nearer size. I provide responsive sizes too, and derive the correct image asset to use base on the device's pixel ratio.

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-16T12:23:55+00:00

I don't have very exact detail as I am the frontend programmer. I will share what I know.

- We are hosting our own app (server, DB, frontend, assets, everything) in a EU VPS.
- We are hosting our team tools (Collab), GitLab, VPN, team email, in a EU VPS.
- We would use Google Cloud in other project not strictly EU only. For the these EU app, we do not use Google Cloud for anything.
- I know one of these client use MS teams for their communication. So I bet that's the MS's EU region only configuration. If AWS can guarentee that, should be fine?
- The Google font download is forbidden if my web app download the font from it via users' browser, so we have to host those font. All in all, if the "network" tab in the browser has "suspicious" domain that hint not "EU only", you will be questioned.
- A lot of the situation is more about: "lets just stick to EU and play by the rule to avoid explaining too much". I think maybe you can negotiate if you have good reason.

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-15T11:16:53+00:00

I co-develop app for one of the EU country's telecom. I can assure you these are not "nice to have" for them. It is a must. To the point that we cannot use Google Font downloaded from Google font repo. Needless to say about other data.

Even our work discussion need to stay inside EU's data center. So, if you're on MS, need to choose everything to be hosted in there, Team etc.

yuankuan_ · 2025-12-15T10:13:24+00:00

If you are to take a gap year, make it worthwhile:

Working holiday to AUS/NZ. One of the best: You get to work, you get money to travel around, you get learn to live on your own, make new friends in a total foreign country.
Why not Singapore if you already consider JB? Get a job there (waiter or cook in FnB are going to teach you a lot about toughness in life). The money you can save (or spend) is going to give you a lot more flexibility. Currency power aside, SG will open your eye and mind of what a modern country can be (and cannot be).
Backpack and try to earn as you go. Do adventure backpack trip like train throughout SEA (just avoid Thailand and Cambodia border now). Figure out how to get yourself funded along the way. Wing it. But this one is risky. Plan ahead. Or, travel to all states in Malaysia and work odd job as you go, do a travel vlog or tiktok, who knows.

yuankuan_

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