Posts by Allen Cheung
Predicting how Remote Work Works
It is now month 5 of Bay Area's general Shelter-in-Place order, and even as the state and our area looks to reopen, the vast majority of companies who can still have employees operate remotely are still…
The Feedback Loop of Rhythm Games
About 15 years ago, giant boxes of peripherals stacked the shelves of gaming retail stores, filled with plastic guitars and copies of the then-experimental Guitar Hero games. At the time, the genre was fresh and exciting, and music games…
Naming Things Good
A colleague reminded me of this corny computer science joke a couple months back: There are 2 hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. Though there are some who dispute the difficulty of…
The End of FIRE
One of my more popular blog posts here still getting regular Google search traffic is building a financial spreadsheet. I put it together to answer the question "how much can I safely spend any given month, and what should…
Down the Memory Lane of Programming Languages
I saw this prompt through my Twitter feed, and decided to join in on the fun: 1994: QBASIC (elem school) 1998: Pascal (high school) 1999: Delphi 2000: Scheme (college) 2004: C++ (first job) 2008: PHP (web dev) 2009: Python + JavaScript…
Strategic Lack of Originality
I was chatting with the CEO of an up-and-coming startup a few months back. I forget the exact context, but on the topic of how much an executive should innovate, they had a powerful operating philosophy: each team…
