Posts by Allen Cheung
Recounting a 14-Year Career in Software, Part II
Part I is available here. As before, I'll bold insights and lessons I've picked up from those experiences. A Scrum in Social Networks I joined Tagged in the beginning of 2008. It billed itself as an…
Software Engineering Salaries Based on Capturing Business Value
I came across this fun article asking whether software engineering salaries exhibit the same bimodal pattern found in other well-paid professional occupations, e.g., doctors and lawyers: Is developer compensation becoming bimodal? Sadly, a glaring lack of data itself renders…
Recounting a 14-Year Career in Software, Part I
A couple of months back, someone asked me about my career in software development and the various lessons along the way. I have relayed individual stories in the past, but I never got around to writing it down in full.…
Review: Artemis
Andy Weir likes his near-future solar system colonization science fiction. With The Martian , his take on sci-fi—light-hearted, yet grounded in real science that's only slightly fantastical and futuristic—meshed into a novel and eventual movie that ended…
The Bamboo Ceiling in Tech
Bamboo ceiling refers to this phenomenon where Asians—here, defined to be a combination of South Asian (majority Indian), East Asian (majority Chinese, Korean, and Japanese), and Southeast Asian (a more diverse set of countries)—are underrepresented in the higher…
The Limits of Fictional World-Building
In the first scene of the movie Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets , there's a handshake between astronauts—hailing from America and China—as one spaceship docks to a larger space station. Subsequently, as the years…
