Posts by Allen Cheung
Technology for Play More than for Work
I came across this article on Vox which makes an astute point on technological productivity, or the lack thereof. He notes that automation has not increased efficiency in the same amounts as in the past: But despite the techno-hype and…
User Interfaces by Programmers, v2.0
We programmers love our settings. The old stereotype of control- and toggle- filled settings screens, each neatly corresponding to a variable in the application, has an uncomfortable if dated truth. We love having precise control over every single parameter, even…
Kindle’s Chosen Specialization Against the Generalist Smartphone
The Kindle Paperwhite has no business releasing new hardware in 2015. It’s a stubbornly single-purpose device, one of the remaining few pieces of consumer electronics that hasn’t been completely consumed by the smartphone/tablet wave. I impulsively bought…
A Gap in Career Mentorship
Nobody told us how mentorship works in an age of multi-company, multi-career employment. We used to have a practice model in apprenticeships, with advancement in a single company following a rigid corporate hierarchy. Mentorship still wasn’t easy, but at…
Review: Career Superpowers
Self-improvement books – at least the ones I read – fall into two categories. There are those who claim to unmask universal truths via research and corroboration across many different sources, and the rest draw from personal anecdotes to provide lessons. In…
Working Harder is not a Good Career Strategy
Remember when a prominent and arrogant venture capitalist called out startup employees to basically stop whining and work harder? He was almost immediately rebuked by one of the subjects of his anecdote as hypocritical, that VCs have everything to gain…
