Fall of 2015 introduced the whirlwind that is Harvard’s CS50 to Yale, quickly becoming “the most popular course in Yale College.” Providing a strong support network, particularly one spearheaded by other students, is one of the key pedagogical backbones of the course. At Yale, this took the shape of a team of 29 students hosting nightly question and debugging sessions, weekly 90-minute teaching…
Let’s Encrypt is a new Certificate Authority that offers free TLS/SSL certificates. Now that it’s entered its public beta stage, I decided to experiment with installing and manually configuring a Let’s Encrypt certificate on a EC2 instance running Ubuntu 14.04, Ruby on Rails, and Nginx. To get started, download the Let’s Encrypt client and run the built-in installer. $ git clone…
My friend Mike and I recently prepared a quick Flask and AngularJS workshop for YHack 2015 (the first YHack in which the two of us did not serve as directors!). Our talk teaches basic backend and frontend web development via the development of a basic blackjack game. Slides Code You can follow along on your own using our workshop code .
The following short story recently went viral in China. I’ve translated it into English, taking some artistic license in the process. You can read it in Chinese here (original author is unknown). It’s a warm summer afternoon and a mother and her son are sitting side by side in the backyard. The son, at home from college, is buried in a book. The mother’s attention is fixed on the twin oak trees…
I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s best-seller, Outliers . Naturally, I was curious about some of his claims and decided to do a little investigating of my own. Gladwell starts the book by suggesting the existence of the following “iron law” of Canadian hockey: “in any elite group of hockey players — the very best of the best — 40 percent of the players will have been born between January…
Hi, tomorrow is your sister’s birthday. You forgot mom’s. Fuck. My mother’s birthday was two days ago and I completely forgot. My sister’s birthday is tomorrow. Chances are, I might have forgotten her birthday too if my father didn’t text me a few hours ago. How did this happen? With our fancy calendar apps and all their incessant push notifications, how could I possibly forget the birthdays of…
What makes a product like Instagram so much more such successful than other, similar photography apps? What makes Apple computers so much more popular in the public eye? What makes Moleskine the de facto notebook for creative types? These questions have been discussed ad nauseum and many convincing answers have already been suggested: these products had superior branding, were well designed,…
Muhammad Ali’s “…sting like a bee” strategy is metaphorically flawed. It certainly worked well for Ali, but the real world isn’t a boxing ring. Here, it rarely makes sense to sting like a bee. Yes, bee stings are painful, but unless you’re allergic to them, a bee sting is nothing more than a brief annoyance. But it’s much worse for the bee. Let’s assume that we’re talking about a honey bee: these…
"Two roads diverge in a yellow wood..." What you do is important and can define who you are and what you stand for, but what you don’t do is perhaps even more important. When the norm is to do something a certain way, choosing not to do it becomes glaringly obvious. And often times, not doing something that everyone else does can be one of the best things that you can do. When everyone is raising…
Yesterday, I watched my friend flip out over Dreadhalls , a horror dungeon game for the Oculus Rift where the goal is to sneak out of a dimly lit dungeon. Despite the technical limitations of the Rift (640×800 per eye in the developer kit) and the fact that Dreadhalls is still under development, Dreadhalls manages to be an intensely terrifying experience. 1 This brings up a serious question about…
I recently led a workshop on basic HTML and CSS at Google Cambridge for MIT’s Blueprint , a 14-hour event for high school students interested in software development and computer science. My talk assumes no prior knowledge and walks you through a simple HTML and CSS website, teaching fundamentals like the box model, classes vs. ids, and more. Slides HTML (index.html) <html> <head> <title> My…
My parents currently live in China and they, like pretty much all of China nowadays, actively use WeChat . The last year, I’ve used WeChat more and more to communicate with them, but I could never understand why they and so many others were so drawn to WeChat over alternative messaging apps like iMessage. Despite a clunky interface, slow load times, and a design language that feels more 2008 than…
When I was a child, I remember being paranoid of standing in public showers at the YMCA and even in hotel rooms. I always assumed that I would catch some sort of foot disease from standing where other people had stood before, forcing me to either arch my toes upwards and stand on my heels or to tiptoe around clumsily. Despite the discomfort, I would stumble around in every public shower I found…
A few weeks ago, I was headed to a hackathon with some friends and since we didn’t know what we wanted to build yet, we decided to casually throw out ideas to each other during the hour long train ride. Luckily enough for us, the man (let’s call him Calvin) sitting across the aisle from us loved to talk and despite not knowing much about “cutting-edge” technology or startups, I learned a lot from…
Around two months ago, when Hurricane Sandy struck the East Coast, my roommates and I launched a charity t-shirt campaign called Shirts for Sandy from the safety of our dorm room. The university placed us into lockdown for two days, keeping us indoors as the storm continued its destructive path, and I decided that it was the perfect opportunity to help the community while also flexing my…
Recently, I decided to switch my personal blog over to Jekyll , a blog-aware, static site generator written in Ruby. By design, Jekyll is simple, fast, and not bloated like most CMS. In fact, Jekyll doesn’t need a database to run and there’s no traditional admin panel to create, edit, and manage your posts. Instead, you get to use your favorite text editor and version control system to push…
It’s an age-old adage taught all over the world to foster a sense of collaboration and teamwork — one that took a hit in the journal Science in August of 2010. Led by Bahado Bahrami of the Interacting Mind Project (University College London and Aarhus University in Denmark), the study concluded that two heads are only sometimes better than one, making the important distinction that both heads must…