Timothy Chen

Calling time out

With the sport season here and everyone cheering for playoffs for basketball and football, you’ll always see teams calling time out during the heated game.

Just playing basketball today after being a long time, I sense that I can’t shoot the ball at all and subconsciously I somehow don’t shoot the ball when I’m wide open.

During these game moments there isn’t really any time to think about anything else but to quickly go back on D when the ball goes to the other side, and start flowing the ball around when we have the ball.

After the game, I finally started to realize that I should push the ball and start being aggressive to the hoop.

Coaches call time out during games sometimes for tactical reasons, but most of the time it’s really pointing out what needs to change and encouraging the team.

Without a timeout, a team won’t be able to reflect and pinpoint things to change during the game, and change how the game is going.

I realize this really applies to everything in life, including our spiritual/emotional life, career, etc.

One thing I really don’t see young professionals doing is calling time out each day or week in the normal going to work routine, and reflect how things are going and what needs to change.

Even when people do have some moments to stop and think, it sometimes will be filled with just frustration or blaming others for whatever happens, or sometimes even worse is when they have no goals when they step into a company and just want to follow the flow and hope to fulfill the requirements to get promoted for better pay.

I think any professional should set off sometime in this busy life, and simply reflect on things in life, be family, career, spiritual.

And just thinking what’s going right or wrong isn’t enough, we also need our coach to remind us where to go and how to adjust.

This coach can be your mentor, books, tapes, ( or your manager if possible ) that helps you see and focus on areas to change and improve.

Without the ability to call time out from time to time, we will simply be heads in the action of our daily routine, and soon enough when it comes to the end of the game ( review time, etc ), often we see surprising results.

Therefore if you don’t do this already, I can suggest you these steps for reflecting on your career:

1. Set some time at night for a quick reflection time.

2. Think about what’s going well and what is not.

3. For the items for what is not going well, think about if you have a good action plan addressing it.

4. If not, ask your mentor or do some research online. Sometimes all you need is encouragement, and it’s never embarrassing to ask for it!

Just simply slowing and seeing your life clearly, will help your career, family and spiritually/emotionally.

What every programmer should know about memory

I didn’t graduate with a CS degree, but I’ve spent countless hours reading books, watching lectuers and actually even doing stanford OS class hw in my spare time to learn much more about algorithms, OS, network, and just how computer really works.

And I really love how much information is really freely available on the internet.

Recently a DigiPen masters alumni recommended us to read this paper from a professor that compiled all the information that a programmer needs to know about memory.

I became my daily read on the bus ride to/from work everyday, reading it from front to back. Although from time to time it goes to hardware specific details that is probably not necessary for more any software enginer to know, but the information is just so valuable I believe every programmer should read it just to make sure you understand all the implications of memory, cache, and how you should at least be aware of how you can affect it.

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/architectsrule/archive/2008/03/21/what-every-programmer-should-know-about-memory.aspx

Have fun!

recently

Feels like a while I haven’t write anything on my blog, so just want to throw out what’s been going on.

Recently working in evri.com, and we have some interesting road map to really be the information curator of the web.

I just got accepted into DigiPen and I will be studying their master prorgam starting this september.

And I’ve been really wanting to close the gaps I’ve been finding in lots of areas in computer science, so I’ve been revisiting materials and actually doing assignments that I found from university courses.

Right now I’m completing Stanford’s OS class hw by writing different parts of the OS and learning x86 assembly to understand what’s going on inside.

Andrew and I have been working with John Jung on brainstorming ideas and I think we have found something great to work on.

Stay tuned!

Startup Perk

I think one of the biggest perk for me working in downtown is the places to eat.

Back in Microsoft days, you’ll pretty much take whatever is in Cafeteria since everything is far away or requires driving.

Now working in Pioneer square, I find that walking to china town isn’t that far away.

Since then, the explorations has begun every week.

The good places I’ve been are like Samueri Noodles (Ramen), Garden (Japanese), Henry Taiwan (Tawiaenese place) in China town.

Tat’s in Pioneer square.

Recently we’ve just moved office closer to the ports, which means I’m further away from China town, but closer to Pike Place :)

Just tried the Taco place today around pike place and I think I’ll probably be coming to pike place 3-4 times a week :)

Being successful

totally depends on what success means to you.

In this world, success means having a certain title, doing a certain type of job, having a certain amount of money, and better having a certain type of influence.

With that standard in mind, it becomes easy to judge everyone as it’s quite clear at a glance.

However, once you see success in things that actually last and bring greatest fulfillment and joy, it never is the things that can be easily measured.

If your goals are like having a family, Godly children, transforming our character, being used by our creator, then every step of your way won’t feel like a burden, every delay won’t feel like eternity, every hardship won’t feel like a dead end.

Because every “step” is a necessary step for a plan that is planned for you that you won’t realize until it’s time.

blogs, status, etc

I see that most people now have a personal blog that talks about family, friends, babies, etc. And then a professional blog talking about professional / technical articles.

So plus the facebooking, twittering, foursquaring, or whatever, you can basically sit all day at home and do nothing but reading and writing these. (if you want)

I already can’t keep up with twitter or tumblr, so I don’t even know what to do if I gonna think about another blog…

TFS vs Git

The very first transitioning task I have to make after leaving Microsoft, is to understand Git.

After using TFS for couple years, you really get used to the right clicking check-out / check-in in visual studio, and the fun of merging. Plus the crazy wait time of waiting to connect to team explorer.

Now coming to Evri, I thought all source controls are essentially the same, and I shouldn’t have any problem learning Git.

Well, turns out it is essentially the same. However, there are so many things you can do with Git it dazzles me sometimes of what I should do with all these options.

Back in Microsoft, we used to work off a sprint branch, and we all just contribute into this branch until testing is over, and merge them back into main.

Now we Git, we can actually create individual branches for any feature / fix you are going to make, and let them live individually.

Although it is doable in TFS, the merging and checking them out / in is just simply painful. Switching branches is just not a designed well in TFS.

What cool about Git is that you have total control of what you want to do with your commits/branches.

For example, if you only want to commit some parts of the file in a patch, in Git you can use git add —patch to identify the parts you want to check-in.

Also if you find yourself unsatisfied with how things are commited, or want to totally reorder things, or just merging your branch with another, git rebase is sooo powerful.

After really learning Git I really get to love it. You feel like you’re in control, finally.

Spell checker in 21 lines of code

Was looking for spell checking algorithms, and this caught my eye:

http://www.norvig.com/spell-correct.html

I like the simplistic implementation and the through explanations of how it works.

check it out :)

New Job

Today is my first day to start working at Evri, on the content acquisition and processing team. I’ll be working primarily on the crawling and processing for now.

2 years in Microsoft is definitely an interesting experience. It gave me enough time and experience to realize what it is like to be in a corporate world, and the politics and decisions around them.

Coming to Evri is a huge change for me.

First thing I notice is that there are really no meetings setup. Everyone just walk around and talk, whereas in Microsoft my calendar is packed with meetings requests.

And ofcourse the big jump from two windows machine into one linux (fedora) and one macbook pro. I constantly have terminals open on both screens doing things, where as in Microsoft I have TFS on one screen, Outlook on the other.

There are lots that can be said, but I’m sure I’ll add much more after the first week finishes!

Tim

Helvetication

We finally released our helveticaion game that’s available on the app store!

I think we don’t really know if it’s a success or not, since we really didn’t put any expectations around it and we aren’t sure how we should market this.

But in this brief experience I realize that writing and selling apps is actually quite easy and fun, and also rewarding.

The moment you see your app live in your iphone, playing and seeing the possibilties, it just starts all different kinds of imagination.

It’s also really fun seeing other people’s reactions to this, and how they’re having fun as well.

The only part that I wish could happen is to see people around me also loving it (like my wife), but you really need to be into helvetica or fonts in order to really love the game, otherwise it just feels like a quiz.

But it’s totally fun to build fun and beautiful experiences for people that cares :)

I believe our next steps for iphone apps will be 1) enhance and fix issues with helvetication  2) brainstorm and execute ideas around data visualization.

More to come soon!