It's about automation

Hi there, my name is Peter Nguyen. I love leveraging technologies to get things done, instead of doing it manually. From the day I found fun with automation, it's my passion. I started exploring the world of automation by exploiting and harvesting the pay-per-click network in the early 2000s. I also immersed myself in the BlackHat SEO world where people need bot creators to help with marketing purposes, i.e: fake reviews/traffic, facebook likes, followers etc. And of course, I profited from those activities.

With more proper external training and knowledge from Computer Science Program at UC Berkeley, I learn that automation is not about websites and servers. I advanced my skill and started building robot to navigate the mazes and capture the bomb. No matter it was a bot that used Markov's decision to selectively scrape website for resources or another bot that utilizes Hadoop to distribute resouces to multiple workers for faster processing. Automation is relentless.

Let me borrow the words from Andrew (Autodesk CEO) to tell you about the future of automation: are we doing less and serving the machines more? Are we losing jobs because of the automation? Instead each of the eras of the industrial revolution all the way to the current machine age creates more job, not less.

Anything else?

Skills and Interests

Beside Automation, I work on many different things from Java GUI Application to Web Application, or from CMS to Android/Wearable devices App. Web security is also one of my favourite. I attended a few Capture The Flag competitions and won the Third Place at Autodesk CTF Reboot 2018. In general, I learn things as I go and I can easily adapt to the new working environment with new tools and technologies.

I was a speaker at SauceCon 2019 (Saucelabs Conference) and was one of the representative for our team at Autodesk Universty 2016 and 2017.

My Philosophy

I believe enthusiasm is contagious. No matter how hard you work, if you do not really love what you are doing and are not excited about it, then you don't call it work. Surprisingly, people will mirror your positive energy without no reason.

People also say, sharing is believing. I contribute most of my work to the open-source community and you can find them on Github. Feel free to check them out and let me know how you are planning to do with it. I'm excited to hear about your projects.

I'm friendly, believe it or not. People who don't know my think I'm silent, people who know me wish I was :)

— Here is what I've done so far—

Bomb Disposal Robot

Home | Github | PDF

2013 - The goal of this project is to place our NXT robot onto a location in a coordinate grid, have our robot locate its position in the grid, and navigate several complicated mazes of walls, one of them contains the bomb and capture that. We map the walls the robot detects onto a general user interface (GUI) that is communicating with and sending commands between our robot and laptop.

Breast Cancer Emergecy Fund

Home | Github | PDF

2015 - We helped the BCEF implement a dashboard to process the new application to apply for fund, which was written in Ruby in Rail. The challenge was to secure the HIPAA information and create different groups of user for administrating and processing application. The project was configured with CI/CD project using TravisCI and Heroku as a deployment platform.

EarthShaker - Notified When It Shakes

Hackster | Bitbucket | Youtube | PDF

2015 - The app will help users (especially smartwatches users) know when there is an earthquake with location and all of the related information. Users can be able to shake their wrist in order to display image of where the earthquake just happened. It was built with GoogleMap API, Twitter API and USGS API.

Museo - An Xtreme museum Xperience

Hackster | Bitbucket | Youtube | PDF

2015 - Museo is both an Android and Moto 360 application that helps museum visitors find the most popular artifact and exhibit in any US museum, making visiting museum more enjoyable and effective. Visitors are also able to "recommend" their favorite exhibits and share their comments on social networks. Museo is designed to unobtrusively integrate into a museum visit and make it into a social experience.

Shortenizer - Shorten your URL

Home | Github | Youtube | PDF

2015 - Shortenizer, a SAAS to help online users convert a long URL to a shorter version. This shorter version of the URL is usually cleaner and easier to share or remember. When someone accesses the shortened address, the browser redirects to the original URL. The application also list top clicked links and top users who shoterned the most URL. It was built with Python Flask framework.

ChuyenTay - Share Your Used Books

Home | Github

2015 - Chuyentay.com is an online community for most Vietnamese Universities where students come and share their used books. They can also choose to rent them to other people as well as donate it for free. The application was built with Python Flask Framework with a lot of fully enriched features. It's an open source project. It had reached almost 500 users and 5 top universities before I retired it.

Arma 2 Dayz Private Server

Home | Github

2017/2018 - I have been running and modding Arma 2 Dayz servers on the 2 favourite map: Chernarus and Lingor. The servers were built from scratch with many customized mods based on players' feedback. There is also a web application for server statistics and ranking, which was built using PHP CodeIgniter Framework. PM me for detail :)

Auto Dropbox

Home | Github

2014 - Dropbox was offering a referral program, in which for each people register and install dropbox through your referral link, your dropbox capacity will be increased. I made this tool to demonstrate how to automate (in other word, scrape or bot, or whatever, you name it) the referral procedure of Dropbox.

Xpassword Scraper

Home | Github | PDF

2014 - The project was a web scraper that crawled over the available resources on the internet, analyze the data and utilize them. Using Markov's decision, the bot will learn the belief which website tends to have, means a better chance to contain the combination (username/password). It will also filter out all of the ad-links.