Blog Entries

May 2015

The github logo is a kitty cat with octopus tentacles, because although a seasoned coder might think this website feels cute and cuddly, to a newbie it's actually quite daunting like looking at a big tangled ball of tentacles. Github is basically a code sharing service that doubles as a hosting server that doubles as facebook. Although it's not as user-friendly as facebook, so it's more like the early day myspace. But for coders, GitHub is an essential tool that minimizes wasted work by promoting structured communication...(click to read more)

DBC Expectations
05.24.15

Now that my first week with dev bootcamp is coming to a close, I am pleasantly suprised at how smooth the learning experience is. Everyone is very supportive on the google+ community with good answers to my technical questions. I have feeling that I will become very good friends with the group even though I haven't met anyone in person yet... (click to read more)

CSS: Class vs. ID
05.30.15

At first glance, there doesn't seem to be any difference between Class and ID. Both of them can be assigned to HTML elements as behavior modifiers. I thought that ID's can only be assigned to one element, but that's not the case either. There is nothing in the HTML and CSS languages to prevent the same ID being assigned to multiple elements. The only difference between Class and ID comes down to specificity, which led to certain conventions in their usage...(click to read more)

June 2015

Ruby: Array vs. Hashes
06.05.15

Ruby has several classes of objects to collect multiple items in one object, two of these classes are Array and Hash. They both share some methods, while some methods are unique to one or the other. However, the most important distinction between Array and Hash is the way they are indexed...(click to read more)

Gregorc Thinking Style
06.06.15

My Gregorc thinking style is Concrete Random. The way my brain recieves information is through my senses, and my preferred modalities of information input are books and videos. I like books and videos more than lectures because they allow me to easily go back and revisit certain subjects in order to solidify them. I think repetition is important because the way our brain forms long term memories is via a process called rehearsal...(click to read more)

Ruby Enumerable Methods: A Force To Be Reckoned With
06.11.15

In my last tech blog post, I talked about the most commonly used collection classes in Ruby, Arrays and Hashes. Ruby has numerous enumerable methods that allows us to manipulate these collections in batch by harnessing the power of iteration (which is just a fancy way to say doing the samething to multiple items in a list). In this article, I will go into detail about one of my favorite enumerable methods: the map method...(click to read more)

Expand Your World: Use Your Tech Superpowers to Unlock More Freedom
06.12.15

About a year ago, while sitting in a hole in the wall cafe in The Mission district of San Francisco, I struck up a conversation with this beautiful Latina girl, Laura. We talked about everything and anything, but most of all we talked about the City itself. I mentioned that although I grew up in the Bay Area, I've never truly experienced San Francisco. My memories of the City mostly involve sitting in the back seat of a car while my mom drives her friends from China around its hilly streets...(click to read more)

Ruby Classes: How to be Classy like Tony Stark
06.17.15

What is a ruby class? No, it's not a course about a precious stone at your local community college. In Ruby, a class is a useful way to organize multiple methods and objects. Ruby classes is a broad subject, with many features like class variables, class methods, instance variables, etc. In this post, I will focus on the basics of class creation, how to make an instance of that class, and how to make instance methods. I will also introduce the concept of class inheritance and how to use it...(click to read more)

Open Mind Night: On taking Feedbacks and Keeping an Open Mike
06.19.15

Last night I went to a meetup held at DBC Headquarters in San Francisco, and I had a chance to take a look around the DBC workspace. It was past 8 p.m. but there were still at least 20 on-site sudents there, hacking away at their keyboards, trying to complete their final Projects. "Have they been here all day?" I asked my guide. "Yep," he said,"and sometimes they pull all nighters." So that's going to be me in a few months, and it soon dawned on me that I'm going to be spending a lot of time with my cohort. Then another realization hit me: my time at DBC can be either very pleasant or very unbearable depending on my relationships with my cohort mates...(click to read more)

The Magic of Modules
06.24.15

In a previous post, I introduced the idea of Ruby classes and inheritance. In particular, I mentioned that Ruby only allows single inheritance, meaning each class can only inherit from one single superclass. Since inheritance is a good way for newly created classes to understand a bunch of methods off the bat, this limitation seems to put Ruby at a disadvantage to other Object Oriented Languages. But that is not the case. Ruby provides another way for a class to gain access to a set of methods: modules. If you've read my previous technical blog posts, you may have noticed that I like to use pop culture references as examples to explain Ruby concepts, and this post is no exception. Today's topic: Harry Potter...(click to read more)

Frowning away the Stereotype Threat
06.25.15

When I first started looking into the tech industry a few months ago, I stumbled up on an article about an female software engineering quiting Amazon because she found the work environment unwelcoming. A quick google search returns tons of articles mentioning this problem women face in tech. This was eye opening for me and somewhat surprising for me. I've always known that there are more dudes than gals in the tech industry, but I thought it was because a lot of us guys were socially awkward teenagers who spent a lot of time playing on computers and subsequently fell in love with the machines. That may explain part of the puzzle, but another part is that women in tech have to deal with this thing called stereotype threat...(click to read more)

July 2015

Getting Loopy with Heisenberg
07.09.15

In a previous post, I talked about the concept of Ruby iterators, which allows us to work on every single element of a collection. Javascript doesn't have the plethora of built in iterator methods like Ruby, but we can still achieve some of the same goals using the all powerful for loop. But first, lets quickly review Ruby iterators. Today I will take my examples from the popular TV series Breaking Bad. In Breaking Bad, the protagonist Walter White is a drug kingpin with a lot of bad-ass quotes. If we want him to spit out all of his lines at once, we can collect his best quotes and save it in an array, then we can iterate over this array with...(click to read more)

Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness
07.15.15

Last saturday was July 4th, and many people in my neighborhood celebrated with fireworks. Seeing fireworks on the birthday of this great nation is nothing out of the ordinary, except, I can't help but notice that many people setting off the fireworks are of Asian or South Asian decent. This is what's so great about this country, people from all kinds of backgrounds can come together and celebrate the same holiday. When I was young, my parents brought me here to the land of opportunity, where fortune favors those who put in the hard work, so I would have a shot at the American dream...(click to read more)

Static vs. Dynamic Typing
07.15.15

Since I'm getting into programming from another field, I was never exposed to many of the more fundamental computer science concepts (and there are A LOT of concepts in this field). The thing is, in a field that is already huge and still growing as we speak, we may never need a very deep understanding of certain topics. I'm a big proponent of learning only what you need. Going deep is the domain of academics and porn stars, and as most us who went through four years of college knew, academia doesn't provide a lot of practical knowledge. That being said, having some exposure to basic computer science concepts are definitely very helpful in terms of providing context for the practical skills. So in this article I will scratch the surface of a fundamental CS topic: dynamic and static typing...(click to read more)

Conflict Resolution: It's Easy as 123
07.17.15

Anger, a liquid fireball that surges up from the pit of your stomach, taking control of your thoughts, reducing you to the most volatile state of a feral beast, ready to tear to shreds the next unfortunate soul who dare to provoke you. We all know what anger feels like, because we are only human, and not all of us are masters of our emotions like the philosopher king Markus Aurelius or other stoic thinkers of the ancient times. There are so much stimuli and stress factors in our fast paced modern lives, that conflicts are bound to arise. Conflict resolution is an art, but there are still clear guidelines and tips that would facilitate the process. In this article, I will share some of my favorite tactics for getting out of hairy situations (Note: you might not agree of some of these strategies, but much like coding, where multiple approaches can be used to accomplish the same goal, conflicts can be resolved in multiple ways. I choose the ways that best fit my own personality and you should do the same)...(click to read more)

The Art of Asking Questions
07.23.15

What is the meaning to life the universe and everything? The answer: 42. This famous gag line from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy shows how meaningless an answer can be when put outside the context of a good question. As we progress in our tech careers, one of the most fundamental skills we will need is the skill to ask good questions. So in this blog I will break down the patterns of both good and bad questions to help identify what features will get your questions answered...(click to read more)

The Evolution of My Website
07.24.15

My website started out with a very basic style, but I have reformatted it many times while my front end developer skills improved. The biggest changes I made was adding the hexagon buttons for social media links, adding an animated navigation bar, and adding the twitter feed. In this article, I will briefly go over the steps and resources I used to make these changes...(click to read more)