Writings from David and Suzi Chang. A story of redemption and faith.
My dad passed away about 6 months ago, in November. It was both sudden and an outcome I had long awaited. I told friends it was 80% relief, 10% grief, 10% anger. It was a strange, consuming, pervasive feeling that everything had changed, even though nothing in my day-to-day life had. I walked around wanting to tell everyone, though I had nothing in particular to tell them. I wanted to call my mom…
I decided to go back to work. I’m going back to Airbnb to do a similar role as before, with similar people, but working on something new (insurance). This is a little bit sooner than I was hoping for (I had been hoping to make it another year), but there were a few factors that made right now make sense. I was able to skip interviews since I was returning and had multiple strong internal…
It’s the last hour of 2024. I have a terrible memory, so I will undoubtedly forget basically everything that happened this year. Let me capture this moment before it passes. But I should also mention… I was also a little reluctant to write this. Looking back at this year, I feel like I did shockingly, embarrassingly little. I usually want to have a lot of stuff to brag about, but I don’t feel like…
tl;dr I recently launched a new iOS app called Words Behind Me (landing page: http://words-app.davidandsuzi.com/, iOS app store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/words-behind-me/id6553972754)
This article from the Expo blog does a great job of capturing what web developers would need to know to transfer their skills to React Native If you’re having problems with the StatusBar showing up (that is, the time, battery, network signal, etc on the top of your phone) (I don’t know why, but I run into this problem on every app I’ve tried), this solution worked for me: github issue link…
There are a few types of UIs/projects I’ve wanted to build over the years that I just haven’t gotten around to implementing or wasn’t sure how to do them:
I’m pretty ambivalent about the project, but since my spare time is so unpredictable, I’m continuing to iterate on Boba Life, as it has enough structure and freedom to keep learning and trying things with at least a semblance of real users and stakes. I’ve slowly been bringing the website more up to date so that users have a place to show all of their drinks, and hopefully it will afford some…
Products and libraries used in this post
Nora has recently been watching a lot of My Little Pony. My understanding of the show is that there is this group of pony friends, each with unique personalities, skills, and roles, that live in Equestria and work together to fight off whatever threatens the magic of friendship. Well, and then at some point, they turn into high school girls who do some sort of academic bowl together and then later…
I have written this post so many times over the last few months. I wrote it enough times that it’s easier to just start over rather than try to piece stuff together from all those different docs! This is also the first time I’m writing a version of this post after leaving.
I’m just one of countless many whose Christian faith was critically shaped by Tim Keller. He was a well-known pastor in Manhattan who recently passed away from pancreatic cancer. I recently read a biography released earlier this year before his death, Timothy Keller: His Spiritual and Intellectual Formation by Collin Hansen.
It’s been almost six years since my last “Technologies I Use” article. Since I’m about to leave my job, forfeit my work laptop, and start a new chapter of life, it’s probably a good time to document the stuff I’ve been using and the workflows I’ve been following over this last stage of life. All of these are in the order in which I thought of them.
While I had nearly 3 months off of work after the birth of our second child, I stumbled upon some cryptography content on Youtube, including some stuff on web encryption and how HTTPS works. HTTPS needs to be set up at the server level and hinges on your server having an SSL certificate that it can communicate to clients. Services like Godaddy will charge you anywhere between $70 and $200 every…
Here are a bunch of things I did last year… I tried to come up with 22 of them, but I could only formulate them into 20:
I first picked up Emotionally Healthy Spirituality, by Peter Scazzero, in 2014 (!) after a mentor had recommended it to me - interestingly, I didn’t think it was very good, and I didn’t get past the first chapter. It didn’t make all that much sense to me and I probably wanted something more dense/cerebral (ie less about feelings). The book discusses things like our “true selves” and “self-care”…
Here are a bunch of thoughts from a few days ago, a little connected under the theme of time, but also a little random:
This had to have been the worst race of my life. My expectations were completely off-base. I set off with the 1:45 pace group thinking I’d be on auto-pilot for 10 miles and then crush the last 3 miles, finishing close to 1:40 and feeling great. My goal was 1:40, my fallback goal 1:45, and… well, I didn’t imagine finishing any slower than 1:45. My Garmin watch/”virtual assistant” thought I could…
Looking back on this year.
After my 2nd full marathon, I started experiencing runner’s knee for the first time. It took me a few years, including a few visits to physical therapy, to actually figure out what I should be doing differently. I’ve relayed this information to a few people individually in the past, so just typing it up as a blog post for easier reference.
So I’ve still been working on an app on the side called Boba Life, built using React Native, Expo, ApolloGraphQL, and Postgres. I use AWS and have a DigitalOcean server running the code. It’s like Twitter where you can have public/private accounts with followers, but instead of Tweets, people can only post their boba orders. You can search nearby shops on a map and see what other public accounts…