Obligatory legalese: this post is about my own personal finance in Canada, not general financial advice. There’s always risk in investments, and they’re done at your own risk.

Backstory

As I graduated from grad school and my paycheques started exceeding my expenses, I realized I have a new grown-up issue to deal with; not too bad for an issue! I wasn’t very comfortable with buying invisible assets that constantly fluctuated in price. When I cut through common human irrationality and realized saving my surplus income in a savings account is a sure-fire way to decay my assets, I started looking into buying shares in funds.

As a rather young software developer without much responsibility, I should be more risk seeking. As much as gambling with individual stocks is tempting, I decided against it; there’s a high risk there and high upkeep for staying current with financial news. Composite funds, with their broad range of risk profile from aggressive leveraged funds to those tied to non-Greece government bonds, provide a low-maintenance, low-risk investment vehicle.

What

Mutual funds are typically very convenient to buy. They’re usually offered in employees’ benefits for RRSP matching or automated withdrawals. The downside is that they take away a big chunk of your money every year. It’s common for them to rake in 2-3% of your savings, even in years when they lose 20-30% of it investing in volatile securities. Exchange-traded funds (ETFs), on the other hand, provide a much cheaper option (usually less than 1% management fee), have higher liquidity, and have been proven to be as effective as actively-managed funds. You’re basically betting on the whole civilization to stay in place, and slowly move forward as it has so far.

Canadian Couch Potato had a good model portfolio back then. I started putting my money in 3 ETFs: 40% trusting governments and companies to pay off their bonds (XBB.TO), 40% trusting the world is moving forward (XWD.TO), and 20% in betting that conservatives in Canada will make their social backwardness worth it (ZCN.TO). This portfolio has a very low management fee, and is traded in Toronto Stock Exchange, so no money is lost in exchange rates.

Where

I opened 3 accounts with Questrade: TFSA, RRSP, and a margin account that holds the rest. They don’t have well-lubricated processes, have subpar customer support, and won’t just stop spamming you, but they have something unique; it’s free to buy ETFs with them. The spread of buy and sell prices is very low, and they don’t have any hidden fees, so it makes dealing with them worth it.

As a sidenote, if you’re going to start saving with them, you can use their referral program to earn $25-250 in cash when opening a new account. They also gives the referrer a $25-50 bonus, so if you don’t know anyone with a Questrade account, feel free to use my QPass key: 486304026379159

How

The first thing I accomplished was to max out my TFSA account. TFSA is a great Canadian program that allows you to earn investment income tax-free. At this time, assuming annual 10% gain from the ETFs, Canadians can save up to ~$1000 a year in taxes. The growing limit of TFSAs and the magic of compound interest will make them a bigger deal in the future. After maxing out the TFSA, I started contributing to my margin and retirement accounts. You can use up to $25K of your RRSP in buying your first home, but anything beyond that is about how much you value your future self.

It’s important to keep your portfolio as balanced as possible (40-40-20 in my case). Selling ETFs on Questrade costs money ($5-10 per trade), so I avoid re-balancing the portfolio unless the gap is too large and new contributions can’t close it. I also try to move funds to TFSA as soon as the limit grows (usually January 2nd), and to RRSP once I decide how much I’m saving this year in my retirement account. This helps keep the taxes low, and sometimes helps with rebalancing. A spreadsheet is all I need to determine how to do the re-balancing.

What Else?

The housing market in Vancouver is overvalued according to unbiased experts. I don’t want to lock all of my past and future savings in a single asset that can dip in value at anytime. Buying a house also eliminates some of your options, and makes your unexpected expenses much more volatile. Real estate is therefore out of question, and that doesn’t leave anything else that can meet my criteria of low-effort, low-risk investment.

Good luck with your investments!

For a long time, I was dismissing suggestions to try out mindfulness meditation. It sounded like newly discovered eastern religion nonsense, advocated by the new age crowd or people desperately trying to fill the spiritual void in their lives. I didn’t care that they advertised relaxation as a side effect. Cutting through the mumbo jumbo to mine practical recipes for peace of mind didn’t seem worth it. Mindfulness remained an untouched realm of good-feeling insanity until frequent remarks on Hacker News made me discover Sam Harris’s new book.

Sam Harris has a reputation for fighting blind faith and irrationality. He’s also a renowned neuroscientist, which gives him all the authority to talk about faith-free mindfulness meditation. In his new book, Waking Up, he brings the attention of scientifically-minded folks to the baby of mindfulness in the bathwater of eastern religions. He’s extra careful to not make any irrational assumptions, and keeps apologizing for using conventionally-unscientific words like spirituality. Sam doesn’t make any claims about reducing our consciousness and sense of self to the physical world. He just invites us to experience meditation for ourselves.

Beside enjoying the read on human brain wonders such as split brain experiment, I was able to identify what Sam calls “the illusion of self” with my psychedelic-induced experiences back in the day. While on magic mushrooms for a few times, I witnessed the illusion of self; my ego, my sense of self, faded away and I was able to look at myself as a separate person. My psychedelic journey was -luckily- very positive, and I always suggest friends to carefully try it out at least once. I didn’t know psychedelics are a shortcut to the state of mindfulness. Wouldn’t it be great to get the same feeling of relaxation, general satisfaction in life and compassion toward others without taking the biological and legal risks?

The point of this post is not to describe what mindfulness is and how one should meditate to reach that state. There are a variety of resources on the subject, and if someone wants to start looking into them, it should be rather easy to get started. The marginal benefit that people get, even at the beginning of their quest, makes it easier to keep motivated and explore more. If you are as skeptical as I used to be, I hope this will convince you to give mindfulness the benefit of the doubt. I did and have been enjoying it so far.

As I was waiting to start a new job in January, I took on a consulting gig to implement a scalable web crawling/scraping system for a company in Vancouver. My client insisted it has to be done using Apache Nutch, which is a great tool for high-scale scraping.

Even though Nutch is first and foremost a web search engine, its “fetcher” component remains a best-in-class web crawler. In fact, Lucene and Hadoop were originally two components of Nutch if this indicates anything about Nutch’s quality. The plugin-based architecture of Nutch allowed me to easily cherry pick crawling-related parts, and plug in custom indexers for my client.

Another reasonable requirement by my client was using Amazon Web Services (AWS) for running the crawler. Without that requirement, I would advise the same too. AWS Elastic MapReduce (EMR) makes it incredibly easy and cheap to start a Hadoop cluster, and it’s seamlessly integrated with other relevant AWS services such as S3. Using EMR is slightly more expensive than setting up your own Hadoop cluster on EC2, and there are a few quirks (e.g. you cannot use the cheaper generation of small and medium instance types), but the reduction in labour costs and general headache very well justifies it.

Nutch’s plugin system conveniently provides a few extension points, where you can hook up your plugins, and they’ll be called at the right stage with all the available information. I only needed to extend HtmlParseFilter to scrape data off of HTML files, and IndexingFilter and IndexWriter to store the extracted data on my client’s existing database. HtmlParseFilter provides the HTML file’s source, and in this case, regular expressions were powerful enough for me. If HTML parsing is required, the highly resilient TagSoup is shipped. You can even use the likes of Selenium to bypass scraper-deterring AJAX calls.

Once I finished writing and testing the plugins locally, it was time to deploy them on a Hadoop cluster. The process is seamless for the most part. There’s probably no software more native to Hadoop than its parent, Nutch. This Makefile is a good start for writing deployment scripts. However, it doesn’t readily work since the AWS command line interface has changed. Another obstacle in deployment was a flaw in Nutch, where your plugin binaries were not present on cluster slaves, so I had to extract and copy the JAR files to the shared filesystem (HDFS) as a bootstrap action.

After overcoming configuration hurdles, the first scraping adventure went really well. It took 10’s of hours on a cluster of 5 smaller slaves for a particular retailer’s website. Scraping is IO-bound in general and doesn’t need heavy-duty machines. Combine that with AWS spot instances and it ends up dirt cheap. I didn’t touch most of the default configurations, and it seemed the bottleneck was the built-in minimum wait for politeness to the target servers. Nutch’s crawl artifacts are also saved on HDFS and can be easily saved on S3 in Snappy format for later analysis.

As the last words, Nutch provides all conventional features for responsible crawling/scraping; from robots.txt compliance, to custom user agent, to minimum delay between calls. Have fun!

Last month, I had a 11-day trip to Iceland, and spent most of it taking a road trip around the country. A few unprocessed pictures taken by my phone don’t quite capture how amazing my experience was. This slideshow is my attempt at sharing some of it nevertheless.

Slideshow plugin by Pixedelic.

If you liked this, you may also like my Chilkoot Trail post.

About a year ago this time, I joined a Toastmasters club, and today, I had my 9^th prepared speech out of the 10 you need for your first title (i.e. Competent Communicator). Toastmasters is a huge network of self-organizing clubs that help members improve their communication and leadership skills.

I realize that different Toastmasters clubs could have slightly different rules and different cultures, so your mileage may vary. However, the cult-like general guidelines of this huge non-profit organization ensure your experience will not be that club-specific.

If you’re the quintessential engineer with limited communication and soft skills like myself, I’d recommend giving it a shot. Each club has a specific schedule for its meetings, and each meeting may contain a few prepared speeches, impromptu talks, evaluations, and other supporting summaries (e.g. grammar usage summary). Almost every role in each meeting will get an evaluation at the end. There are one-off contests once in a while too.

Every club member will be working on two tracks in parallel; communication and leadership. I personally put more focus on my communication track, which at the beginner’s level, consists of presenting 10 prepared speeches for the audience. Each speech has specific objectives, and as you progress, they become more advanced. For instance, they start from merely not using notes to watching for your body language and vocal variety.

The leadership track was never very attractive to me. The tasks in that track are obviously designed to help organize the club without any control from Toastmasters itself. Most of the administration is done by volunteers, and the contribution is gamified by awarding leadership badges and honours to those who donate their time. Even though it might have some educational value in leadership, I don’t think you can get anything more out of it than you do at your work.

Even though Toastmasters seems to be mostly about public speaking, it teaches engineers valuable lessons in soft skills. It helps with your speaking and, to some extent, writing skills. However, the two invaluable skills are coming from the general audience and the evaluation parts. The general audience makes you pick subjects that anyone can understand and is intereted in, and the limited speech time (around 5-7 minutes) forces you to make it concise. It also teaches you how to be tactful and diplomatic in your evaluations, and still get your points across. They specifically encourage using the “[shit] sandwich technique”, where you enclose the rough parts of your feedback with pleasant fluff.

As usual, the time and effort spent on Toastmasters has diminishing returns. I feel like the optimal point of retiring for me would be after the first communication manual, but of course, your experience may be different. It’s taken about one hour of my time every week, and a couple of hours for each speech. The membership fee is very little compared to your time and its value. You can always attend their meetings as a guest and decide for yourself if it’s your cup of tea.