“After graduating from Mathematics-Computer Science at the University of Science, I joined Global CyberSoft as Software Developer. I was promoted to the position of Team Leader, not long after that. After about four years working with the company, I found a passion for ERP (business management system), so I switched to SAP ERP Consultant. However, nearly three years later, the ERP market fell into a rather tricky situation. That's when I found a new direction for myself.

At that time, I had a friend who was working for VNG Corporation. My friend invited me to make games for fun, but my job was related to CDN (Content Delivery Network) infrastructure service development when I was admitted to the company. At first, I just thought that I wanted to learn more about the working environment of VNG, how to see it, and the salary here is also good, so I agreed to work, but I did not expect to stick for that long. During more than seven years, I have held several positions such as Senior Developer, Team Leader, Software Manager, etc. Until the company developed a new branch, invested in building a Cloud Service system (besides three main areas: Game, Zalo, Zalo Pay), VNG designated me as Head of IoT.”

“IoT is an acronym for the Internet of Things. IoT aims to connect devices, tools, and objects in everyday life with the internet to communicate, access, control, collect information and administer those devices to increase performance and efficiency in use. I said that in the old days, the air conditioner was just an air conditioner. There is no concept of networking or handling. But later, people attached the air-conditioner to the internet, each with a microprocessor. You can control it to turn on and off without having to be there.”

“It could be:

1. Smart agriculture
2. Smart city
3. Smart factory
4. Smart office
5. Smart home, etc

I see many high-end buildings (Smarthome) that have applied IoT. For example: When you are the last to go out, you just need to turn on the "I'm out of the house" feature in the app. Automatically, the lights will be off, and the air conditioner will be off, the curtains will be drawn, the windows will be closed. When you get back home, just in the parking garage, you turn on the "I'm home" feature; the system will know immediately and start to restart the lighting system, turn on the air conditioner, the curtains will be pulled out and open windows, etc.”

“Previously, my team developed Cloud camera products. Usually, when a camera is purchased, people will insert an SD memory card; all data will be stored on this memory card. When there is a need to use the data recorded in the camera, one has to download it and then copy it to a USB or computer. The storage capacity of traditional cameras is also limited. Our solution is to bring all of these archives to Cloud for convenient handling, centralized management, backups, and easy capacity upgrades on demand. When the camera connects to the internet, it will transfer all data to Cloud; just log in to the user account to see it. When you want to use the data, just press the "download" button, and you do not have to take many cumbersome steps such as removing the memory card and plugging it into the computer.”

“Probably when I was the team manager that operated the CDN system at VNG. At that time, my team was asked to make an urgent change to the system. Specifically, update the version of a service in the Microservices model in response to the new feature. As a rule, every time you want to make a change, you must follow the steps like when the code is finished, move to test on the staging environment, then push to the production environment to try it again. Usually, the push to production time is set at midnight (off-peak time) so that in case something goes wrong, the team can still fix or rollback in time (return to the original condition).

I should have discussed with the team that made a request, telling them that the change must go through the same standard procedure as above, but because they urged me and partly subjective, I think this change is not essential, so I didn't do that. When the developer code finished, I hurriedly approved it all, finished it up for a preliminary test, then put it into production. The changes are also not made at night as in principle. About 4-5 hours later, a third party detects the error. When they reported it, I guess this error arose right after the change was made, but it couldn't be a few hours later. It's just the team and me being rude, so I didn't find out.

We struggled to find the root cause until 7 to 8 hours later; we solved this problem. During the time of the error and my team tried to fix it, about 60-70% of the users were affected, unable to use the service. The consequences are also quite serious, so my boss called me to clarify the problem and record the mistakes according to the company's regulations. I draw the lesson that what is related to the operational environment; the production environment must follow the strict process. Sometimes, when you are superficial or do not have enough time to make an assessment, it is elementary to make a mistake.”

“Now I see that every industry that applies technology is a trend. The IoT is also that trend. You must have a passion. When participating in any field, you must work concentrated, work to a place, there will be many growth opportunities.”