Multiple domains can be hosted with nginx server blocks. Below I give an example of how to generate a shared SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt, and how to setup two server blocks to use a shared SSL certificate.

Assuming you use Let's Encrypt as your CA authority, generate a SSL certificate for the domains:

sudo letsencrypt certonly -a webroot --webroot-path=/var/www/default/html/ -d example.org -d example.com

Alternatively, if your not using Let's Encrypt as your CA, read up the docs http://nginx.org/en/docs/http/configuring_https_servers.html take a pause to note:

The SSL certificate needs to contain several names, in the SubjectAltName certificate field, for example, you might want to have example.com and example.org domains. Note the SubjectAltName field length is limited, to about 1000 characters IIRC.

Now I assume you have the SSL certificate generated.

Update the two server blocks /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.com and /etc/nginx/sites-available/example.org accordingly. A /etc/nginx/sites-available/default is not need. See the diff:

server {                                                        server {
  listen 80;                                                      listen 80;
  listen [::]:80;                                                 listen [::]:80;
  server_name example.com;                                    |   server_name example.org;
  return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;                    return 301 https://$server_name$request_uri;
}                                                               }
server {                                                        server {
  server_name example.com;                                    |   server_name example.org;
  listen 443 ssl http2;                                           listen 443 ssl http2;
  listen [::]:443 ssl http2;                                      listen [::]:443 ssl http2;

  ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/default/fullchain.pem     ssl_certificate /etc/letsencrypt/live/default/fullchain.pem
  ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/default/privkey.p     ssl_certificate_key /etc/letsencrypt/live/default/privkey.p
  include snippets/ssl-params.conf;                               include snippets/ssl-params.conf;

  root /var/www/example.com/html;                             |   root /var/www/example.org/html;
  index index.php                                                 index index.php 
  location / {                                                    location / {
    try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html =404;                          try_files $uri $uri/ /index.html =404;
    autoindex on;                                                   autoindex on;
  }                                                               }
  location ~ /.well-known {                                       location ~ /.well-known {
    allow all;                                                      allow all;
  }                                                               }
  location ~ \.php$ {                                             location ~ \.php$ {
    include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;                              include snippets/fastcgi-php.conf;
    fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;                       fastcgi_pass unix:/var/run/php5-fpm.sock;
  }                                                               }
}                                                               }

Note the folder that contains the SSL certificates /etc/letsencrypt/live/default/. You may need rename the folders that letsencrypt generated.

Additional references:

https://www.digitalocean.com/community/questions/letsencrypt-for-multiple-domains-on-nginx

Growing up, I looked up to a lot of heroes for motivation, and Steve Jobs is one such inspirational hero for me. He was influential to a lot of the values I hold true today. I had read his autobiography – multiple times – and I think it is one of the best books I've read. I wish I had been able to be join Apple while he was still around, to work with him, and experience the reality distortion field™ in person.

Most of the conversation I have with my friends and family would generally contain topics of what my ideas are, and how I plan to achieve them. They are interest in what my values are, how I make decisions. Usually I end up paraphrasing things that I've before, to others.

I want to summarize some of the principles I hold, as best as I could. Hopefully I don't forget too much.

Principles

On What You Should Do

In the FB post, I talked about two principles (that help decide what you should do).

1. Do the things that inspire you, that you love, and
2. try to be really good at it, hopefully having commitment and courage to do it.

Let me elaborate on this, and then talk about some additional principles for how to get you to the goals you want.

Firstly, by doing the things that inspire you and that you love, this results in personal satisfaction. It's very important, because it keeps you motivated for when the problems get tough – and there are going to be a lot of tough problems.

Anything worth doing is going to be difficult.

Of course, the assumption is that these things that you do are going to be creating value; whether it be for yourself or others. Just don't use this as an excuse for binge playing video games, or binge watching Netflix.

Secondly, trying to be really good at it is important for you to create something of value. It's important to have both breadth and depth – and being good at something gives you depth, a competitive edge over others.

Sure, there may be others that are smarter than you. But they have only 24 hours in a day, just as you do. So that places a limit on what others can possibly do, during their spare time. You don't have to be the smartest to have a competitive edge – it's sufficient to excel at skill, albeit seemingly small.

Commitment and courage are other necessary conditions to developing the skill necessary. You should already have the motivation and desire to pursuit something you like doing; whether it be solving a problem or becoming really good in a skill.

The second point complements the first.

These two principles are just about sufficient to be a guide on how to decide what to do, what your next target is, but not how to get there.

On How To Get There

Now that the objectives have been set, what determines the success of it is how to get there.

1. Manage your free time. We all have 24 hours, how that time is spent that really matters.
   • Identify things that you should invest your time in, in order to reap the fruits of your labor.
   • But also balance life and work. Allocate your most valuable resource, your time, well – with significant others, working out, even video games. The important concept is moderation. For example, watching a season of Netflix is probably no use to getting to your goal.
2. Read more. Non-fiction. On topics that immediately relevant to you.
   • The value of information depends on context. If I told you what the stock price of some company would be in the future, that would be very valuable; on the other hand, stock price in the past is less valuable.
   • Knowledge is key. Sharing knowledge is also key. Don't forget about your peers.
   • Reading can give you a head start, often what your peers cannot obtain. Compared to others, you are making more informed decisions, better strategies and tactics. Against competition, even the smallest leverage or advantage makes a difference.
3. Build projects. Develop your skills.
   • But don't work in isolation. Get feedback to improve faster.
   • Success and failure doesn't matter as much; there are things to be learnt even within failures.
4. Network with others, build your connections.
   • The brain's neurons work with others to achieve a common goal. A single neuron can't achieve much on its own. As I said earlier, anything worth doing is going to be difficult. And difficult things need more resources to be tackled.
   • In machine learning, a neural network is inspired by the neuron architecture. When you learn, you are making new connections; and when you practice, you are strengthening the connections.
   • A strong network makes you better informed, helps you get relevant information quicker, creates more opportunities.
5. Start today, rather than tomorrow.
   • Why is today such a good place to start? Starting today gives you a head start than starting tomorrow. And since you didn't start yesterday, then today is the optimal day.
   • Take a small step, begin by just doing a little. Great accomplishments don't happen overnight. Great Wall of China wasn't built in a day.

That's all for now folks. Thanks for reading!

PS:

I'm writing this while at the Starbucks on El Camino Real near my house, and coffee's power is fading. I will try to contribute and share knowledge more often.

If you found this blog to be useful, let me know! My email is jason@sunapi386.ca and Facebook is https://www.facebook.com/sunapi386 – feel free to contact me.

Music: Driftmoon.

This is a tale about how I met my Sophie. Happy Valentine, Sophie! 情人节快乐！

In February 2016, I spent the first two weeks travelling in China and celebrating Chinese New Year. Having family across the world felt great, and I could visit them any time. China is in an economic boom, and growing very fast. It felt good to be connected to other parts of the world. I had recently graduated university and moved to the Bay Area for just about 3 months. I still felt there was a lot of travelling I could do, to explore the world. But travel is costly, from the time and financial perspective. Is there is another way?

Becoming a hosting on couchsurfing.com

From December to end of March, I was renting the master bedroom in a two bedroom apartment. Since our apartment had two couches, I felt I could make use of them to use it to host some couchsurfers and make friends from all over the world. So I subscribed to the couchsurfing email newsletter.

One day while scanning through my email of couchsurfers looking for hosts, Sophie's profile photo caught my eye. She was very pretty. Her profile described herself as a high level headhunter, ambitious, eager, and interested in startups.

I offered to host her on the first day she lands in US. But she replied with moderate interest, and describing an overly ambitious schedule of visiting too many cities.

Unfortunately, she had found a host already, but she was willing to meeting up for coffee. We met on Sunday Feb. 21, 2016.

That Friday and Saturday, I was hosting my first couchsurfer, Satoshi, from Japan. His profile described him as an aspiring entrepreneur visiting SV. I was hosting him, my friend Shaon was looking to buy a house. While we drove around, I was messaging Sophie to see when and where she can meet up with us.

Meeting my 2nd couchsurfer

At the end, we settled for meeting at my home, and both Sophie and her host met my friend Shaon and Satoshi.

When I first saw her, I had two impressions: "oh my goodness she is beautiful, cuter than her profile photo" and followed by "oh she's shorter than I thought".

After getting acquainted, we all went on a spontaneous trip to see Half Moon Bay and try to catch sunset. I briefly chatted with Sophie in the backseat, before doing the driving myself.

Returning, we went to visit Facebook, which was a fun place and suitable for visitors. Apple had no such open door policy. Sophie and I chatted some more about who we were.

Taking silly photos at Instagram HQ

Towards the end of our visit at Facebook, I had made a good impression with Sophie. She had changed her mind about not staying over and asked her couchsurfer whether it was okay to stay with me. Of course it was.

First impressions

We chatted late into the night. And as I closed my eyes, I knew I liked her. A lot. I was so excited that I woke up at 5 am to blog. And then after I was done, I woke her up to chat.

We had talked and next thing I know, it was morning. I still had to work, but I decided to take half day off to get up later, show Sophie around my office, then drop her off at Stanford University. And I missed her immediately.

Date #1: Las Vegas

Immediately after dropping her off, I convinced and coordinated with her so I can come to Las Vegas and travel together. Below is a cute video taken at Hoover Dam. I had rented a yellow Camaro. I had always wanted to drive a yellow sports car!

After this trip, Sophie had returned to China. We decided to try long-distance dating, and we did video calling consistently, about 3 times a day, 30 minutes each time.

Date #2: Hawaii

After a while, we wanted to meet up again. My family wanted to do a big vacation, and we settled on going to Hawaii. I invited Sophie to meet with my family.

After the trip to Hawaii, we still continued to do long-distance, and we meet up again. This time I wanted to meet her parents. So I visited China.

Date #3: Shanghai

Being with Sophie in China is like being a tourist. Although I had gone to Shanghai before, having Sophie show me around is a completely different experience.

I had remembered to take some videos this time. (I didn't have videos from Hawaii trip. Shame.)

We are now progressing well.

Background

Since April this year, I essentially transitioned from an application developer to a web developer. Full stack.  It's quite exciting! There are some who perceive web development as an inferior choice of work, but I have to disagree. In an era where mom and pop shops have websites, not having a webpage front for your business essentially means you don't exist. Because having a webpage allows you to reach a greater audience. So, I see it as a very powerful leverage.

I have a little background developing for Ruby on Rails, from my Dotabuff scraper project. Now that I look at it, my understanding of rails is fairly incomplete. Rails, and Ember alike, are scaffolding heavy. The intuition is that as the creators of the web framework, they are more knowledgable about how you should go about designing the architecture than you are. Consequently, it means transitioning from one Ember/Rails project to another means very little time is required.

What is Rails/Ember

Rails is a complete web framework. It handles the entire web pipeline. From

1. routing a URI,
2. to finding the controller for the page,
3. who translates the URI to some requests on the data model and accessing the database,
4. to finally rendering the web page template.

Rails 5 (which should come out of beta this year) has an API-only mode. That means it doesn't template web pages (no step #4). Rather, it replies with the data directly in JSON format.

Ember is like Rails, but it's designed to handle the frontend, leaving the backend architecture up to the user. It means the focus of this framework is on rendering web page template. Any dynamic data that needs to be displayed gets translated to an API call to go fetch the data. Then it converts the response into an ember-data model, and finally fills in the template to display it.

Why make it more complicated by using yet another framework just for the frontend?

So at this point, you're probably wondering why the additional complexity? Why not just use Rails since it supports the entire process?

Well, you see, it's about speed and responsiveness. Every time you visit a different web page on Rails, an entire html file is rendered for you by the Rails server and sent to you. 

Think about that. What does it mean? It means it's slow. Unresponsive.

Rendering pages cost time. Sending the rendered page across the network also cost time. The larger the rendered file size, the longer it takes. And this is not cheap, you notice the web page flashing when you visit different pages.

So that begs the question of how do we avoid sending out rendered pages from the server? Rendering could be done on the client, rather by the server. This is where frontend frameworks come in. Rather than requesting entire web pages all the time, just request the data the page needs as an API call, and render it on the client. In between visiting different pages, data that was available before is put into client's local storage, for faster access via the cache.

Frontend frameworks

Ember is one of three popular frameworks. It's also the most complete framework, as in the most to learn. In terms of scaffolding and complexity, they rank like this:

1. Ember. The framework for ambitious projects.
2. Angular. Somewhere in-between.
3. React. So lightweight, it can hardly be considered a framework.

Any of these would be fine. Indeed, as with any beginner, I did some digging. And discovered that the bigger I dig, the more mess I got myself into. As a rule of thumb, I certainly knew I had no clue what I'm doing with a frontend framework. So if I'm to learn a frontend framework, I might as well learn from what are the best practices, the most scaffolding frameworks. For the same reasons why I prefer Rails as well.

My project

Currently I am building an internal project for Apple, and I (obviously) can't disclose what it is. But it uses Ember and Rails 5 API-only mode.

I setup both Ember and Rails to use web-sockets, but not really hooking them up at the moment, because I'm working on getting out a functional demo website. When the time comes, this website will not only be responsive, but updates in real-time.

See you at my next blog post folks!