Irving Ruan

The First Six Months

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 19:56:00 -0700

Back in September of last year, I started my first real job, working as a software engineer at TuneIn. I came in with limited knowledge, experience, and a small toolbelt, not knowing whether I’d be ready, especially with such a talented and world class engineering team present. The technical challenges we face everyday are tough to solve. There are no predetermined and finely tuned test cases to write code against like we were conditioned to back in school. This was not a safe incubation chamber to write poor code in with the only punishment to be an arbitrary letter grade.

This was different. This was the real world where bad code can mean many bugs, headaches, and revenue loss for the company.

Being the youngest engineer at TuneIn, my peers stand as giants to me. I am constantly humbled by their experience, expertise, and breadth — as well as depth — of knowledge in their technical domains. However, due to the openness and the relative permeability of ideas across different engineering disciplines, I cannot help but be a sponge in this endless sea of knowledge. While my coding chops are by no means extraordinary, they have unquestionably taken gigantic leaps since I started working.

I soon realized that it’s not just merely the act of doing that helps improve your craftsmanship, but doing it with people who are better than you at it that significantly helps you become great at your craft.

Be open to learning. Be receptive to failing. Surround yourself with people who are better than you at your craft. The rest will naturally follow.

Value of Destruction

Thu, 05 Jul 2012 16:50:00 -0700

During the first year or so of my programming voyage, I bumped into many roadblocks. Some algorithms were broken, this method didn’t do everything that I wanted it to, that class needed refactoring, and other such hurdles were common. I was afraid to modify certain parts because I thought that that was the only way to do it, and if I changed or deleted it, I’d be wasting unnecessary time. But I always ended up with a better and more elegant solution when I just erased the darn thing and started over.

It’s not always about fixing what’s broken. It’s about starting over and forging something better.

I think the reason why I had this fear of deleting code and starting from scratch back in the day is because I thought only parts of my code were incorrect, and thus finding the erroneous portions and deleting them would do the trick. But, you see, that is the trick—find what’s broken, then fix it. But there’s a catch: previous code tends to cloud your perspective. Therefore, any headway you make is consequentially tethered by prior thinkware; past assumptions ultimately are not conducive to novelty. This is bad and you may very well end up at a worser place than you were already in. I cannot remember a time when destroying code and beginning anew hasn’t been beneficial.

I’ll provide a personal anecdote: when I first started designing API, I wanted to make it as good as possible without ever touching it again. But as anybody with experience in architecting API can attest to, it’s not an easy task—in fact, it’s almost impossible to get it right the first time! You’re bound to scrap and rewrite much of it. But as a stubborn rookie, I was relucant to start over. However, once I overcame my pride and rewrote it, it turned out much better. I just had to admit to myself that it sucked and needed to be discarded.

So cast away the anchor of familiarity and don’t be afraid to start over from scratch once in a while. Ironically, you have more to gain than you have to lose.

The Next 50 Years

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 16:20:29 -0700

They will be scary. They will be crazy. They will be amazing.

When you look at human technological progress up until the Renaissance, it really wasn’t all that impressive and glorious. Sure, there were some important milestones: inception of stone tools, the wheel, gunpowder, paper, and other raw materials. They, more or less, enabled the basic means such as transportation, resource management, and transfer of knowledge. But they weren’t giant leaps, relatively speaking. Agrarian societies were still prevalent and most of the world’s population did not live in cities.

Progress was slow.

However, things started to change around 1800. The Industrial Revolution happened. Many scholars argue that this pivotal period served as the point in history when mankind started witnessing the genesis of truly rapid growth. Vertical integration, the assembly line, and mass production of goods proved to be essential catalysts that skyrocketed the rate of manufacturing. Nearly the whole world was affected by this and many of our goods wouldn’t have existed had it not been for the inventions that were created during this significant time period.

Fast forward to now—you’re most likely reading this on a computer, an iPad, or probably even a smartphone. Can you believe that’s even possible? A little electronic device that’s connected to a complex global network consisting of millions of machines—each (in)dependent of the other—all able to speak to one another thousands of miles away at blazing speeds via bursts of electric signals encoded as a series of 1s and 0s!

Even as an engineer, I still find that mind-blowing.

And come to think of it, the personal computer hasn’t even been around for half a decade yet. We live in a remarkable age in which doctors can pull up a patient’s information on a glass-interface aluminum slab, customers can pay for a cup of coffee with their smartphones, and people can control their thermostats over the Internet. Most people 50 years ago probably wouldn’t have seen this coming.

Everything is changing. Education, medicine, software, design, entertainment, transportation, energy, and God else knows what. And they’re changing faster than we can keep up with them. Whether people of the future will call our age the Digital Revolution or not, I know that the next 50 years will be amazing.

There is Nothing to Writing

Tue, 26 Jun 2012 11:09:00 -0700

Ernest Hemingway:

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

Hemingway, while putting it frankly, certainly has it right. There is no magic way to do something—you just do. But that doesn’t always translate well in our minds. We will expend our energy in finding shortcuts to something before pursuing it instead of just diving in head first. It makes the undertaking appear more accessible. However, we mustn’t forget that 99.99% of the work still remains even after “eliminating” shortcuts.

When I embark on new endeavors, I often joke to myself on how I’ll just “YouTube or Wikipedia it” to learn the material. It’s usually my ironic way of mentally preparing for the arduous journey of going down a rabbit hole. But think about it: wouldn’t it be great if we could just rapidly acquire skill and knowledge, like they do in The Matrix, without actually doing work? Imagine the time and energy it’d save!

As of the year 2012, mastery, and even competency, of a craft requires thousands of hours of labor so there’s no getting around that. Shortcuts obviously make the learning easier, but be wary: do not misplace your objective of getting good at a craft with solely finding shortcuts. Instead, shortcuts ought to be treated as instruments of insight that you find during your journey. They only become problematic when they destroy, corrupt, or leave out nuggets of understanding and intuition. Because when they do, you’ll be spending unncessary time holing up gaps of understanding where your “shortcuts” unearthed in the first place.

All you have to do is to just sit down with your craft and bleed.

Apple's Next Foray

Mon, 11 Jun 2012 18:59:50 -0700

Among the many great items announced during today’s WWDC keynote, Passbook certainly caught my attention. In short, it’s an app that integrates with popular brands such as Target, Starbucks, Fandango, United Airlines, Amtrak, and several others.

It’s a big slap in the face to not only the rare—if ever used—Google Wallet but Pay with Square.

With over 200 million credit cards in its database, Apple knows that it has a noticeable advantage over popular competitors such as Amazon. And I doubt that those brands being initially rolled out with Passbook will be the only ones.

Apple dominates digital music, movie, and app distribution. Payments, it seems, will be Apple’s next foray. It’s a relatively difficult industry to crack from what we’ve seen thus far, but this is a momentous step for the Cupertino giant—more so than we realize.

The How and Why of Design

Sun, 03 Jun 2012 17:14:00 -0700

I recently finished reading Frank Chimero’s The Shape of Design. The book is a well written treatise on design as a connection-creation engine, a view of designing that makers of things know to be inherently true, but have a difficult time materializing it into words.

While I don’t want to crudely summarize Frank’s work, I do, however, want to stress one of the important principles that was extolled.

The How and Why

The How is the means to execute your imagination into the tangible. It is the process that governs your craft. It is the implementation, the metalworking. It is the mode that, more often than not, consumes us when we’re making things. It’s in us to sweat the details inasmuch it makes us forget the Why, a pattern that’s often detrimental to the creative process.

The Why is the purpose. It is the invisible spirit that guides us toward the end goal. It is the line on the horizon that we need to sit back and look at from time to time while driving on the road. As Frank clearly reiterates many times, craft ultimately needs purpose to take full form.

In the end, design is merely a means to an end. But it is such an important means as it creates experiences for the audience. It develops a shared dialogue between the designer and the audience. But since it is a means, it is then, by consequence, an incredibly powerful tool that we can use to build a better world. Frank ends by noting:

And if you look closely, and ignore the things that do not matter, what comes into focus is simply this: there is the world we live in and one that we imagine. It is by our movement and invention that we inch closer to the latter. The world shapes us, and we get to shape the world.

Leveraging Happiness

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:59:00 -0700

It’s commonly accepted by most people that the work you do validates your sense of happiness. Merriam-Webster defines “happiness” as:

1. A state of well-being and contentment

2. A pleasurable or satisfying experience

(2) implies more emphemerality and is not an apt definition of what we think of when we internalize the notion of happiness. The organic definition of (1) seems be a more natural way of interpreting happiness and will serve as the informal definition for the purposes of this discussion.

Even though happiness is inherently good, the problem with happiness, like most things in life, is that we’re always wanting more of it. This is epidemic to almost everybody. As incredibly competitive and curious mammals, we are always on voracious path of seeking more. For the most part, this is actually good: competition breeds innovation and curiosity permits us to be the wonderful explorers of ideas that we are. But when it comes to happiness, we have it all wrong.

I propose an alternative outlook on the issue: be happy first, regardless of the output. You can do good work, but being truly happy enables you to do great work.

The biological confirmation of this is dopamine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter released by our brain that helps us feel happy—especially in reward-driven learning—but it also plays a key role in our cognitive abilities. By not letting external factors bring you down, a natural disposition towards being happy amplifies your brain’s ability to not only be more receptive towards learning new material, but facilitates your cognitive abilities in whatever you’re doing. This is why being happy is vital to maximizing our mental growth—before, during, and after any activity.¹

Even if the biological reasoning of this does not sound convincing, try to imagine yourself learning something while in an unhappy mood. You probably won’t be open to learning that much, will you?

This is why we need to stop this backwards thinking that the output of our work, investments, and relationships sought to substantiate our sense of happiness. Disappointment is inevitable in everything and there’s no avoiding it. What we can do, however, is prepare and react to it in a positive way.

I leave you with this quote from the retired American football coach, Lou Holtz:

Life is ten percent what happens to you and ninety percent how you respond to it.

Be appreciative and leverage your happiness as a utility. You’d be surprised by the great things you can achieve when you’re naturally happy.

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Source: Public Library of Science ↩

Sunk Costs

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 13:08:00 -0700

We often find ourselves disappointed by immediate results. If the returned investment in the nearest time window is bad enough, it can make us back out from the investment altogether. When we take out our money—or more valuably, our time—from an investment because we’re not seeing swift positive returns and then value our venture based on previously incurred costs that went into the labor, the problem essentially reduces down to the notion of sunk costs.

In business, this isn’t usually the best value system to adhere to when executing future decisions. While it serves as a good indicator of what decisions to avoid making in the future, the temptation to completely bail out of a hefty business investment because of unsatisfying immediate feedback ought to be evaded since it can be extremely difficult to predict the market even as short as one month out.

The same goes for any creative endeavor we pursue.

When we take up a new hobby, we will initially suck at it. Once the frustration of failure begins to outweigh the longing for success, the mindset that we wasted all that time, energy, and money on an investment that did not yield immediate returns will start to settle in. This type of mentality is ultimately detrimental, if not parasitic, as it will affect future decision-making when considering new crafts. The pattern of people dropping trades, professions, and even ideas just because the feedback is not immediately good enough is more pervasive than we realize and more often than not, the concept of sunk costs viciously infects our value system at the tipping point in that process.

As an example, I will provide a personal anecdote. There were many times during college when I was tempted to drop my major because I didn’t think I was good enough since the time I invested wasn’t yielding any positive results. I had no idea where this investment would take me, and the mindset that all the time I have investedhas gone to waste because the immediate results were unsatisfactory was ever present. But as I soon realized, immediate results do not always manifest themselves in tangible forms, such as grades or money. My immersion in my craft therefore gradually wired my brain to approach problems differently than before. Previous attempts at hard problems—while the endeavor thereof did not give me returns on time, sleep, or money—solidified a foundation of knowledge that eventually prepared me for solving harder problems. I went forward with this mentality hoping to leverage my initial and ongoing investment even though I did not always receive immediate positive feedback.

But as most of us have or will learn, this is natural in nearly everything we do! I was “losing” my time, energy, and sleep. I was not acquiring anything except for theoretical knowledge as I was not good enough to earn money yet from this skill. Because of the immediate feedback, I wanted to quit. But like all things in life, we have to look further than the nearest time frame, even if we have no idea what it may bring. This is exactly why you feel incredibly happy when your investments work out, even if they took years to bear fruit.

Don’t be discouraged by the immediate results if they are not positive, especially if the endeavor you’re undertaking is difficult. Most good investments incur costs before turning positive. The key is to recognize that natural valley in the slope of learning and stay the course. If the investment doesn’t incur any costs, then it probably isn’t worth it.

Your Organic Bicycle is Still Powered by Gasoline

Wed, 25 Apr 2012 00:11:23 -0700

After listening to the most recent episode of Roderick on the Line, I started thinking about how people, including myself, frequently tend to cry out on their little soapboxes: “screw the system”, “fight the man”, and other anti-establishment declarations. I don’t think we really know what we’re talking about when we say stuff like that. I don’t think we realize just how entrenched and complicated the systems we are attempting to fight really are.

I’m a personal advocate of challenging the status quo. This sort of idealism operates as one of the main catalysts for change. For revolutions. For the betterment of mankind. But as a citizen—nay, human being—I’m civically obligated to participate in society: I pay my taxes, I buy my goods, and I work hard. Therefore, I ought to engage in a functional society that has the capacity to render similar services to me. The notion of communal reciprocation is imprinted on our DNA; we survive by cooperating with each other and contributing to the common good.

But then there are those people who do nothing but “fight” the system. Or rather, they want to appear like they’re fighting the system. They refuse to pay taxes because it violates some core principle in their lofty sense of libertarian idealism. Or they don’t buy leather products because they say little Vietnamese kids make them. Or they are pro-green and refuse to purchase anything that does not adhere to the Rules of Environmental Friendliness. Okay, that’s good for them that they don’t buy into that lifestyle. But they still use the public roads and services that the rest of us are shouldering. They eat food, and that food must have been transported from somewhere using gasoline. And if they’re purchasing it from the local farmer’s market, don’t forget that the farmer must use gasoline to get his stuff to the dude who is super eco-conscious of everything he consumes.

These systemic processes are always more complicated than just a + b = c.

So, unless you’re completely self-sufficient and independent of the services and goods rendered by society—in which the rest of us are contributing to via our work, taxes, and time—don’t go espousing views of Fighting the Man. Don’t lecture others on the evil of taxes and how I should refuse to pay while you’re riding your Organic Bicycle™—which, might I add, was grown by either hardworking Americans or destitute Chinese children—on the roads we helped pay for. Don’t reprimand lawful citizens for not bringing reusable and compostable cups to Starbucks when you’re probably wearing cotton clothing manufactured by gasoline-powered machinery.

I should note that I’m not limiting my thesis to tax-hating anarchists or eco-crazy fetishists. I, too, hate paying taxes. I’m also a proud proponent of clean energy and eco-friendly solutions. But I’m not going insofar to completely opt out from those systems and still play the same game that contradicts my views but it provides the benefits I seek. Because in the end, taking out small parts here and there from the system but keeping others will ultimately lead to the destruction thereof.

You either fully participate in society or you don’t. There’s no middle ground: critiquing small parts of it and refusing to partake yet still reaping society’s goods all while fancying yourself as a Rebel is very hypocritical.

The System is more entrenched and complicated than we’ll ever imagine. Instead of always fighting the system, start contributing to it. It’ll be good for you and the rest of humanity.

The Cost of Creating Abstractions

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 18:01:41 -0700

As a software engineer, I’m required to understand most, if not all, of the software stack. From high level source code down to—at least, hopefully—the assembly language level, the steps in-between should pose no threat to my understanding. However, as new software-based technologies emerge everyday (Ruby on Rails, Cocoa, Jekyll—just to name a few), the ladder of abstraction is getting bigger.

This is a good and bad thing.

The good thing is that these new abstractions have enabled us to create better tools and products for consumers and producers alike. It has made the labor of making stuff easier than ever before. And not to mention, it has nearly razed the barrier of entryway to coding for curious-minded individuals. The computer engineering world has seen its cake of abstractions raising, all the way from writing “code” with physical punch cards to assembly code to high level language to visual programming. What an evolution, I daresay! I probably would have shot myself in the foot if my first computer science class at my university was taught in x86 assembly.

The bad thing is that these new abstractions create the illusion that the step of moving down the ladder is unimportant, unnecessary, and rather laborious. “If it works at this level, why do we need to go down one step to understand that level? Shouldn’t we just accept this as magic and move on?” Andy Matuschack makes a great point when he discusses feeding abstraction with understanding:

Abstractions empower and accelerate. As usefully encapsulated nuggets of understanding, the creation of novel abstractions drives a field’s progress, but their invention is possible only with deep understanding of present ideas. So I declare: if we are to master a field, we must accept none of its abstractions as magic. Rather, we should yoke them as automations of what we already understand.

A prime example of understanding what you’re working with is programming in the language C. Unlike other languages that have automatic garbage collection, C requires not only knowing when to use memory functions, like malloc and free, but why. A good knowledge of the latter doesn’t only make your C program less prone to memory leaks, but it also necessitates a more acute understanding of memory representation, segmentation faults, and a whole array of other core computer science problems.

Like Andy mentioned, we run into obstacles when we fail to learn the foundations of the abstractions we’re working with. To be truly a great cook, one must not only accurately follow recipes, but understand why they’re fabricated as such.

The cost, then, of creating new abstractions is that the next generation will likely ignore the underlying abstractions that serve as the building blocks for the present one they’re working with. This becomes complicated when something goes wrong and they’re unable to synthesize a solution because the problem stems from lower steps in the ladder of abstraction. Creating new abstractions then has the side effect of desensitizing previous ones, even the ones that occupy the foundations of the ladder. Instead of regarding them as instruments of magic, we should instead deconstruct them as processes we already ought to know.

If you’re constantly working with abstractions, comprehending the composition of the different levels in the cake you’re working with will ultimately help you make a better cake. Andy provides us with motivation for confronting the abstraction problem:

The goal is to provide a sandbox—not a syllabus—for experimentation and the formation of understanding. Understanding is marvelous because it’s so readily a feedback loop: we can use it to make more of it.

If we are to build a ladder to the moon, we should be comfortable enough to climb back down to earth. Moving up the ladder of abstraction, then, is just as important as moving down. As the brilliant Bret Victor points out, we learn the most about a system not by understanding the individual layers, but by effortlessly transitioning between them.

It's Okay to Suck at a lot of Things

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 20:35:17 -0700

Most people forget that the ones who are really good at what they do—writers, engineers, artists, photographers, etc.—weren’t always as good as they are right now. They were pretty bad at their trade once. In fact, they sucked at it. But what we see now is their product after years—if not decades—of practice, making mistakes, and doing that all over again. And the amazing thing is that they’re not done—their work is unfinished and it’s still constantly improving.

On the other side of the coin, we also see a lot of crap, too. Fortunately for us, our brains are geared toward selectively remembering the great stuff that we encounter. The problem is that we have this subconscious tendency to compare our work, or even ourselves, to the best. This doesn’t get you anywhere. Stop this habit at once if you are doing it: there will always be somebody better than you in a specific area or line of work. More often than not, this vicious type of thinking will just provoke you to throw away the towel, thereby effectively erasing any potential you may have had. This is bad, so stop.

The important thing is to accept that you suck at a lot of things. And guess what? That’s perfectly okay.

Maintaining humility is incredibly important in everything you do. Nobody likes arrogant people. Humility allows you to work harder. It lends clarity. Without it, one would have no motivation to improve. Life’s a long journey and keeping an open mind and heart is key to self-improvement and self-learning.

Wynston Marsalis, the famous jazz musician, once said in a pithy statement, “the humble improve.” The arrogant slack off. Don’t become the latter.

So, don’t be disappointed if you know you suck at some things. Life’s a mess and you’re always going to suck at lot of things, so take a deep breath, enjoy the ride, and work hard to improve yourself.

Teachings of Tea

Sat, 14 Apr 2012 16:33:21 -0700

For most of you who know me, you’re well aware of the fact that I love brewing and drinking tea, and enjoy doing so in good company. The effect of the elixir is empowering and relaxing at the same time, and few beverages—let alone consumables in the world—retain that magical ability.

But I didn’t always love the humble drink as I do so now. In fact, I used to dislike it. Before I came to college, my parents used to brew Tieguanyin (the famous Chinese oolong tea) at home and beseeched me to enjoy it with them. But I desisted. I hated the apparent bitterness of the drink. It just didn’t taste good, like candy, soda, or pizza did.

When I came to college, I decided to give the drink a chance. I got my first tea set, and asked my parents for a pack of Tieguanyin before I left. Since then, I grew extremely fond of not only tea, but the art of preparing it. The inherent poetry of the process and its unassertive nature to bring people together is something to be appreciated—nay, praised!—for.

So, rather than bore you with lengthy discourse, I will outline what tea and the preparation thereof has taught me about life.

Bitterness is subjective. It’s how you respond to it that counts.
Be patient. Tea takes time to become the flavorful drink that it is.
Be curious. Understand the art behind the unfurling of the leaves, the downpour of hot water.
When you finish a cup of tea, another one awaits.
Some teas taste better in the second steeping. Don’t give up after the first cup.
Too much tea per cup is just as bad as too little. Balance is everything.
Tea is meant to be shared with friends and strangers alike. Be kind and welcoming to all people.
Enjoy every sip as you would enjoy every moment in life.

For something so unassuming, the soothing beverage holds a lot of wisdom.

F.A. Porsche on Design

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 00:17:13 -0700

F.A. Porsche on Design:

F.A. Porsche:

Design must be functional and functionality must be translated into visual aesthetics, without any reliance on gimmicks that have to be explained.

Controlling Knowledge

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 22:31:35 -0700

As a current university student, I hear a lot of talk about getting into med schools these days. I’m no stranger to the usual “sorry, I have to study for the MCAT” or “I’ve been doing nothing but studying for the MCAT!” liners from friends and strangers alike. Problem is: med school acceptance rates are and have always been very low nationwide. That means a lot of people get rejected. A lot of people’s dreams of becoming that doctor: dashed!

Yes, it’s really hard to get into a good med school. You have to be [presumably] smart, have top of your class grades, a great MCAT score, and a handful of other merits to warrant consideration, much less an interview.

Personal belief: a lot of people who want to become doctors should probably be doctors if they are passionate enough. Problem: the system is naturally set up to be incredibly selective and elitist. Most people will probably concede the first point, but elitist, Irving? Come on, that’s a bold statement to make.

Allow me to explain.

Take the freemasons, for example. Way back in the day, they used to be one to the few groups that possessed the necessary knowledge to build solid and admirable buildings. In fact, having the ability to physically construct—not architect—buildings was one of the most respected professions back then. And so, the fraternity of the Freemasons protected that knowledge. They controlled it: providing and handing down the knowledge to construct buildings down to the next generation of the Freemasonry, withholding it from the public as a way to extoll themselves. But the knowledge of construction work isn’t protected nor is it as respected nowadays as it was a few hundred years ago, now is it?

But what made it selective and seemingly elitist back then? It wasn’t necessarily because the knowledge of making buildings was impossibly hard to understand; it’s because it was—excuse the pun—constructed to appear that way.

Tech startups have emerged in the past couple of years at a ridiculously rapid rate. If you wanted to start a company, all you needed is pretty much a laptop, some cash, and a lot of hard work. But to get into med school, there are bureaucratic vines to wade through. And most people just aren’t “qualified” enough on paper. The tech world is always ripe for disruption. The med/health care world? Not nearly as much.

I will venture to say that starting and building a successful company is as difficult as becoming a doctor. What makes the two different is that the knowledge that one would need to pursue the former is scattered around the Internet, made possible by the countless free contributions and resources people have willingly provided throughout the decades. The knowledge for the latter, however, is sheltered behind the elitist walls of med schools.

Even if a person is inclined enough to learn the material and science to ultimately qualify as a doctor, no one would trust him if he started his own practice or worked at a hospital because he lacks the proper accreditation from a med school—the necessary papers proving that he has a M.D. This is not always true in other fields, especially in technology and engineering.

I understand that doctors and other professionals in the med field are entrusted with people’s lives and their potential patients should reserve the right to be cautious. However, the red tape shouldn’t be so rigid when it comes to gaining entryway into med school.

It’s unfortunate that the open and easy-to-enter nature of many fields—such as computer science—is unable to grace the medical discipline. I can only hope that the recent advent of free online courses and tools will make the knowledge of the medical field more accessible in the future and less dependent on the “treasured” knowledge walled off inside med schools.

This is Why You Spent All that Time Learning to Program

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 23:32:39 -0700

This is Why You Spent All that Time Learning to Program:

James Hague:

I don’t have to follow the familiar standards of whatever kind of app I’m building. I don’t have to use an existing application as a model. I can disregard history. I can develop solutions without people saying “That’s not how it’s supposed to work!”

That freedom is huge. There are so many issues in the world that people complain about, and there’s little chance of fixing the system in a significant way. Even something as simple as reworking the local news is out of reach. But if you’re writing an iOS game, an HTML 5 web app, a utility that automates work so you can focus on the creative fun stuff, then you don’t have to fall back on the existing, comfortable solutions that developers before you chose simply because they too were trapped by the patterns of the solutions that came before them.

You can fix things. You can make new and amazing things. Don’t take that ability lightly.

It’s definitely one of the reasons why I have come to love programming.

Convergence of Problems and Paths

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 13:35:19 -0700

A couple of weekends ago, I attended a financial conference at my university because I wanted to learn more about the nuances and dynamics of finance (especially the market), even though my major is academically unrelated. While the workshops I attended didn’t offer much value, I learned a great deal about how the rating agencies—Moody’s, S&P, Fitch—exacerbated the financial crisis in 2008. The keynote was insightful and provided humor that I don’t often hear in the field.

Most, if not all, students that were there were focused on advancing their careers. While I’m not discounting the economic and professional validity of that attribute, I do not think that should be the cornerstone value for engineers, or anybody for that matter. I became significantly more cognizant of this when we were all having lunch and a student that sat next to me asked what career path I see myself going down given my background in computer science.

Questions such as these may seem easy for most people to flirt with, but in reality, they’re ones that require years of experimentation and in-depth thought.

I told him that I don’t ruminate my purpose through the lens of what my career path is or will be. Instead, I suggested the practice of looking at it in terms of what problems I care about solving with the tools and knowledge I’ve developed, as that’s a logically—and morally!—more important pillar to live by in my opinion.

The “career path” naturally follows from that ideal.

Defining an Era

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 20:57:20 -0700

Defining an Era:

Horace Dediu:

Some suggest that Apple is an anomaly and does not reflect the economy. To truly understand the state of the economy, they say, means to subtract Apple from it. But I feel this is exactly wrong. Apple is, through the iPhone and iOS ecosystems, defining this era. Just like Microsoft defined an era of increased productivity through the creation of the “knowledge worker”, or like GM re-defined transportation and the notion of the brand in the 50′s, or like IBM re-defined business process efficiency with automation in the 60′s and 70′s, these companies were not anomalies of their era. They were the eras. They were the locomotives of growth that taught other companies how to operate and the contemporary managers how to manage.

Apple is the zeitgeist of this era and it’s not slowing down anytime soon.

Teaism: Union of Taoism and Zennism

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:18:00 -0700

If there’s one thing that was largely absent in Western civilization in the 17th and 18th centuries, it was the awareness of the peaceful and uncompromised nature of Eastern thought. However, tea became perhaps the unifying force of the time, bringing the two worlds closer to understanding one another over the unassuming leaf. Kakuzo Okakura, the early 20th century Japanese writer possessing seemingly eruditic knowledge, muses over the culture of tea in his magnum opus, The Book of Tea:

Tea began as a medicine and grew into a beverage. In China, in the eighth century, it entered the realm of poetry as one of the polite amusements. The fifteenth century saw Japan ennoble it into a religion of aestheticism—Teaism. Teaism is a cult founded on the adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order. It is essentially a worship of the Imperfect, as it is a tender attempt to accomplish something possible in this impossible thing we know as life.

The Philosophy of Tea is not mere aestheticism in the ordinary acceptance of the term, for it expresses conjointly with ethics and religion our whole point of view about man and nature. It is hygienic, for it enforces cleanliness; it is economics, for it shows comfort in simplicity rather than in the complex and costly; it is moral geometry, inasmuch as it defines our sense of proportion to the universe. It represents the true spirit of Eastern democracy by making all its votaries aristocrats in taste.

This roughly encapsulates the teachings of Laotse, the father of Taoism. Okakura posits that this philosophy of tea, otherwise known as Teaism, is the poetic infusion of Taoism and Zennism. In short, Taosim appropriates the importance of the Path and that the only Absolute is the Relative whereas Zennism focuses on the comprehension of opposites and the art of meditation. Okakura then writes:

The whole ideal of Teaism is a result of this Zen conception of greatness in the smallest incidents of life. Taoism furnished the basis for aesthetic ideals, Zennism made them practical.

But of course—like all worldly philosophies—its essence cannot be preached or written in fine tuned detail—it must be experienced. Okakura then rallies us to engage ourselves in drinking and pouring of tea as the modesty of the drink had the power to place Western and Eastern thought at peace and equal with each other while at the same table. Tea then serves as a bridge for the two without compromising their identity.

What particularly struck me about the ideals of Zennism, though, is its guiding doctrine of relativism. When a flag is blowing, the prevailing dichotomous thought states that either it is the wind that moves or it is that flag that moves. But in Zennism, the real movement occurs in the minds of the observers. Addtionally, Zennism places an interesting importance on design. Specifically, how uniformity in design ought to be avoided. He states with regards to the Sukiya, or Japanese for tea room:

Slavish conformity to traditions and formulas fetters the expression of individuality. Uniformity in design is a constant fear that’s present in the tea room.

This vocation pretty much echoes the theme of questioning the status quo. The humble dogma of tea can actually act as a suitable example for endeavoring to abandon the old and create the new.

With all that being said, I do not think that the message of Teaism is some high-class philosophy of transcendental enlightenment. It’s invariably a fusion of Taoism and Zennism, but those philosophies ultimately strive for peace, harmony, and balance without asserting moral rectitude superiority. An important thing to keep in mind is that we should not treat one essence as greater or lesser than another. Like Zennism, the uncertainties of life force us to think and experience in paradoxes. Okakura leaves us with this passage:

Those who cannot feel the littleness of great things in themselves are apt to overlook the greatness of little things in others.

Our Growing Obsession with 2D Touch Interfaces

Thu, 15 Mar 2012 10:17:39 -0700

Marketing videos such as this envision a future where 2D touch technology is ubiquitous. It looks nice and cool, but is that how we humans naturally interact with the world? Through 2D surfaces?

While those concept videos elicit hopeful feelings about the future of technology for most people, it’s almost sort of painful for me to watch. Why do people predominantly think 2D glass is the best medium to communicate with technology?

Our hands can do so much more.

Touching 2D surfaces is just one of the many countless methods for us to interface with the world. But yet, it’s the one that gets the most attention and often prized as the pinnacle of futuristic human-computer interaction. Yes, the iPhone and iPad are great. They’ve enabled us to visualize, consume, and produce material in novel ways that were essentially nonexistent nearly over five years ago. They are fantastic tools. For now, at least.

Bret Victor summarizes the power of hands perfectly:

Look down at your hands. Are they attached to anything? Yes—you’ve got arms! And shoulders, and a torso, and legs, and feet! And they all move!

Any dancer or doctor knows full well what an incredibly expressive device your body is. 300 joints! 600 muscles! Hundreds of degrees of freedom!

The next time you make breakfast, pay attention to the exquisitely intricate choreography of opening cupboards and pouring the milk—notice how your limbs move in space, how effortlessly you use your weight and balance. The only reason your mind doesn’t explode every morning from the sheer awesomeness of your balletic achievement is that everyone else in the world can do this as well.

With an entire body at your command, do you seriously think the Future Of Interaction should be a single finger?

With that being said, I don’t have an answer for you. If you were expecting a fleshed out and flawlessly written solution to the future of human-computer interaction, I’m sorry to disappoint. What I am suggesting in this brief post, however, is to look at it from a different perspective. And this perspective is so innately obvious that we’re consistently overlooking it.

Why I Left Google

Tue, 13 Mar 2012 21:43:13 -0700

Why I Left Google:

James Whittaker:

Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn’t invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation. The fact that no one came to Google’s [Google Plus] party became the elephant in the room.

At this point in time, I honestly don’t care much for what’s happening to Google.