The life and projects of Chris Chung
“Prodigality of Time, produces Poverty of Mind as well as of Estate.” - Benjamin Franklin Chronic procrastination is the type of procrastination that occurs often and becomes an impediment to leading a healthy life. While all humans procrastinate to some degree or another at least occassionally (after all, we can’t be doing all of the things we’d like to at any given moment), chronic…
An interesting place to examine human motivation is the world of games. People freely play games despite their being little or no extrinsic justification for doing so. No one needs special techniques or pep talks to convince themselves to play a game, they just feel like doing it. One of the reasons games are fun to play is because they involve well-defined feedback loops of goal setting, followed…
In fall of 2017, I designed and built a CNC-based gardener that I call Saladbot. It has many sources of inspiration, chief among them is the amazing Farmbot project . I wanted to simplify that ambitious design considerably. My goal was to reduce costs, improve ease of assembly, and narrow down the functionality to a small subset of tasks: planting, monitoring, and watering to start. I wanted to…
Can you tell in which century a painting was produced by looking at it? In this post, I explain my attempt to get a computer to become proficient at just this task. I was particularly interested in the area of art because it has long been considered to be a final frontier for computers. We humans have recently gotten used to ceding ground to the machines, but at least art seems like the last…
“How often I have sitten down to write, and rejoiced at interruption; and how often I have praised the dignity of resolution, determined at night to write in the morning, and deferred it in the morning to the quiet hours of the night.” — Samuel Johnson Last weekend’s weather was magnificent. The breeze was just sufficient to prevent you from sweating despite the glow of uninterrupted sunshine.…
The flow state is the condition of mind that occurs when we feel extremely focused on our work. While we are in flow, time swims by and we feel blissful engagement with whatever we are doing. We feel challenged, but not overwhelmed, and we get a continual sense of progress towards a larger goal. Crucially, it is a polar opposite of the more familiar state of “mind wandering” (for example, driving…
I’m no life coach or guru, but the purpose of life for the modern, enlightened human has got to be something like the following: “Do the most enriching or high-impact things that you possibly can as much as possible”. Now, it may not be clear what those high impact activities are, but may I point out some obvious chaff? For those of us who work on the computer, a great deal of the time spent…
I’ve been using the Pomodoro Technique, off and on, for about 5 years. In using it I have seen some marvelous gains in productivity. I have also come up with some small alterations that I believe improve work quality, help me avoid burn out, and aid in the lifelong quest to defeat the gremlins of procrastination. The Technique Here’s the wikipedia article , but this is the gist: Take a timer, set…
A module is an organizational unit of code, and usually represents code designed to do one task, or one function. If you store like-purposed code in its own bundle, you will always know where to come looking for it when bugs come up in the future. Modules are used in order to: Encourage single responsibility for code units Improve code maintainability / organization Namespace code so there are no…
In the last article I wrote about interfaces and polymorphism, I reviewed their definition, usefulness, and some basic strategies of implementation. In this article, I show some examples of powerful interfaces in action. Explicit vs. implicit interfaces Some programming languages give you the ability to write real interfaces with definite consequences of non-compliance. For example, PHP uses an…