Posts by Allen Cheung
An Experiment in Adsense Advertising
If you’re not running an ad blocker, you may notice that there are small Google Adsense ads running on this site. After having blogged for 11 years without ads, I had wanted to see what the numbers for online…
Review: Creativity, Inc.
Pixar has the reputation of being a pretty amazing company. Even back in 2002-2003 – when there were “only” a handful of blockbusters to the Pixar name – they were already a legendary firm on the Berkeley campus, one that my undergrad…
Cards in Computing Interfaces
We relegated skeuomorphism to yesterday’s design fashion. It’s a tool that was supposed to be largely unnecessary , now that users fully understand purely digital interfaces. The remaining use case for realistic analogies in computing is as cues to…
Which Software Jobs will be Safe from Software?
I came across a thought-provoking article the other day that postulated the eventual obsolesce of software engineers. The author draws parallels with the renaissance enjoyed by those who write software today, with those who operated telegraphs in centuries past: eventually…
Musical Rhythm Games are Motivational
I’ve enjoyed a lot of music games over the years. Before we had Guitar Hero and Rock Band in the US, there was already an established genre of rhythm games, largely made and played in Asia. They centered around…
Somebody Else’s Crappy Code
Recently, I’ve been tasked with adding features to a product and codebase that I did not write. This of course happens all the time; if the code is at all useful, it will be extended and evolved by an…
