Posts by Allen Cheung
The Persistence of Printed Books
I guess not everybody shares in my enjoyment of the Kindle and the movement towards digital books. The New York Times reported that the sales of e-books has actually slipped in 2015 from the year prior, and that readers are…
Review: The Three Body Problem
Science fiction is not a particularly huge genre in China as far as I can tell. Chinese stories – film, books, and television – set in the dynastic periods are common, but fiction about scientific advancements into the future don’t capture…
The Overwhelming List Argument
I call it the overwhelming list argument™. It’s a rhetorical device that I see used to try to present something as more grandiose and complicated than it actually is. The technique is simply list out properties about the subject…
Embracing Language Variety
Programming language debates are the religious wars of software development. Much like the xkcd comic on the futility of standardization, attempts to unify or consolidate our existing landscape of languages – and libraries and frameworks – usually just compound the diversity. For…
The Company Guessing Game
Raise your hand if you’ve ever received mysterious emails or LinkedIn messages that resemble this: We’re looking for awesome [engineers / designers / product managers] to join our totally awesome team in [major tech hub]! We need you to help…
Where Companies’ Excellence Matters in Job Hunting
Learn from the best. I held a fruitful discussion a couple of weeks ago with a coding school graduate looking for their first software programming job. They were able to get a few offers from startups (this is San Francisco,…
