Posts by Allen Cheung
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…
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,…
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.…
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…
Faking Software Design
I’ve been having a back-and-forth with a friend on getting a software developer job in Japan. Cultural differences aside – and there are quite a few – we reached an impasse in debating how to approach a software engineering…
The Relic of Postage Stamps in an Digital Era
My toddler was playing around in my office over the weekend, and ripped a book off of my bookshelf. It turned out to be an old postage stamp collection album. When I started the book some 25 years ago, stamps…
