About Me

Hello, I’m Tommy!

At the Tea plantation, Cameron Highlands. Great place to enjoy a cup of tea

Hey there! Thanks for dropping by to take a gander at who is behind the website and apps.

Nice to meet you! I do app and web-related development work for a living. For the record, I’ve been doing Android Development for quite a while now and still enjoy the process.

I’ve built my career around Android technologies, it’s fascinating to see it grow from the Gingerbread era back in the early 2010s into the current fully-fledged mobile operating system. The growth is phenomenal! The rate of changes is astonishing to watch in the last 5 years and how much it had changed.

From little to no structure in its software development process into a full-blown architectural design that uses clean architecture, writing testable codes, modularizing screen into a library for simpler maintenance to which open source libraries to use to Google coming up with JetPack Components.

What’s This Blog?

Well, this blog serves as a place for me to write about ideas, stories, things to recommend, how things might work, and discuss concepts toward a path of living a better and purposeful life. It could be anything in philosophy, technologies, gadgets, life, cultures, productivity, finance, money, or something I learn and wish to share in my opinion.

I think the underlying thing that ties everything together is how (at least to me) we should approach a certain thing, thought, event, situation, and circumstance. Thus, it becomes an interesting question to find an answer to as these thoughts occupy our mental state every moment until we go to bed at night.

The intricacies and interrelatedness between the mind and the world outside of our body are so captivating to explore.

Being Human

The monkey does not know about the Coca-Cola brand but does know the sweet sweet liquid store inside which it is trying to get more out.
Photo by Eirik Skarstein on Unsplash

For instance, we cannot escape money if we choose to live within a civilization to which most of us are right now. But what is money? The short answer to that is a valuable human construct of the mind we made up to make storing value easier. As money does not exist in nature.

The monkey would not want your paper money but will thank you for a bunch of bananas.

Additionally, everyone must at least have a rudimentary understanding of philosophy because everyone has some kind of metaphysics they hold near and dear to represent their reality. How I see and sense the world is different than how you feel and perceive it.

I am deeply intrigued by these questions because I don’t see them that way as I reach working age until the Covid-19 pandemic happen which gave me time to digest things over.

The goal is to gain a sense of clarity so I’m better equipped to discern about an idea, event, and action — the better I can see the nuances attached to them. Hopefully, it would give me a better understanding of myself with the world.

I think Socrates put it well of what I am going for and to those who have a tinge of wonder and curiosity in them.

The unexamined life is not worth living.

Socrates

My Android Apps

I do develop and publish apps myself and all of them are on Android. You might be able to guess by now from the menu navigation or the posts on this blog that I got a few namely The Stoic, Greek Wisdom and the latest release is Zen Enso.

They may seem like a simple app but I have put a great deal of deliberation and hard work into delivering the best user experience possible. It is thanks to what I know about the whole process of making an app from my career and understanding what works and what does not.

I have only 1 aim for all my apps, if you do chance upon them and use it regularly. That is to provoke thought from the quote you get every morning or when you swipe left to get a new one.

Words have power and thinking is hard. So, if you give it a little effort every day to work toward a path of understanding yourself and the world a little bit more every day. In time, you will reach a point near those legendary Zen Master, Buddha, Samurai (Miyamoto Musashi), or whatever enlightened person you want to be put into the placeholder.

Slowly, I’m starting to see things a bit clearer as time goes by. I would describe it like this, you’re able to slice through thick bullshit, a thin fog of confusion, smoke and mirrors, and slight of hands.

Once you can see this, things become very funny because you see through human nature. You’ll have a big belly laugh when you do get to this stage.

Treat my apps and contents on the blog, or rather anything that makes you react, as the finger-pointing toward the moon as Bruce Lee once put it. Don’t focus on the finger though! Else you will miss out on all the heavenly glory.

If your curiosity is like a cat then what I offer is but a sparkle that might ignite a fire within you. Once lit, it may never go out while it might ebb and flow as time passes. I found the best mentor is often Life itself and lessons will be given until it is fully learned.

We are living in a very fortunate time right now because access to any books, information, knowledge, and expert or a community is but a few clicks away. You can create, consume, make sense, and have discourses to your heart content. Google and YouTube is your friend if you learn how to use them.

My Tech Specs

Android Jetpack
Android Jetpack

I build Android apps. More history can be found on my LinkedIn page.

Tools: Android Studio, Android SDK, Kotlin, Java, Jetpack Components, Git, Jira, Bitbucket, Confluence, Gradle, Mysql, and Sqlite.

Why the Domain Name?

Did you notice? It is a bit cheesy to have my blog ending with a .rocks rather than a normal .com. It’s saying that I am a Rockstar! 😂 Well, I will spare you with my lousy humor.

I wanted to get a domain with my name and preferably with a .com but didn’t manage to do it as Tommy Lee is a popular name. For instance, the drummer from Motley Crue or Tommy Lee Jones himself.

On a random stumble, I saw this .rocks top-level domain is affordable and thought that this might work. So, tommylee.rocks was born.

Let’s Connect

Twitter · LinkedIn