Personal site and portfolio of Joanne Cheng.
Get to the point. Use straightforward language. Show examples. It’s more effective to use examples rather than only using prose. Use figurative language sparingly. Like macros, metaphors can be useful, but too many can make your writing difficult to follow. ( metaphor usage intentional ) Remember: Users come to your documentation to learn. If you want to be creative in your technical writing or…
Lately, I rediscovered my love for data visualization and mapping. As I get more and more news stories about extreme weather events in my feeds, I’ve been wondering about how to make impactful visualizations to communicate how our weather patterns are changing. I recently discovered the now discontinued Storm Events Database and made a very simple chart tracking floods in Virginia Beach, an area…
One of my favorite things in Clojure is cond-> . cond-> is useful when I need to conditionally build out a map or a list, a very common scenario. ( let [ case1 true case2 false ] ( cond-> {} case1 ( assoc :a 1 ) case2 ( assoc :b 2 )) ;; {:a 1} I recently ran into into a function in an Elixir project that needed to conditionally build out a map. The implementation used a case statement with pattern…
In 2020, the New York Times released an article detailing the effects of redlining on the neighborhoods of Richmond, VA (my current city of residence). Redlining refers to the classification of neighborhoods that were “risky investments” by the US government. In the 1930s, the Home Owners’ Loan Corporation, a US government agency, assigned categories to neighborhoods to determine which were…
We’re given a list of users: ( def users [{ :first "John" :last "Parsons" :active? true } { :first "Amanda" :last "Clark" :active? true } { :first "Kevin" :last "Lawrence" :active? false } { :first "Caroline" :last "Mills" :active? true } { :first "Warren" :last "Smith" :active? false }]) and we need to display the full names of the active users and return the result in a list, like so: [ "John…
Whenever I feel unproductive and unable to work, I follow a piece of advice I’ve heard many times before: take a short break away from the computer, return, set a timer for 15 minutes and work until the timer runs out. Sometimes I’ll feel motivated to keep working, sometimes I’ll need to stop and repeat this process or admit defeat for the day. At the very least, since I focused during those 15…
Here are some things that I really like lately. Art: Owen Pomery’s drawings . His drawings make me feel nostalgic for places I’ve never been. View this post on Instagram You can travel anywhere in your head. Here's an ocean pool for the weekend. #illustration #arcitecture #isometricart #isometric #conceptart #swimmingpool #oceanpool #lido #lidobeach #modernist #modernism A post shared by Owen D…
Last year, I discovered bullet journaling for the first time. Bullet journaling is a planner system developed by Ryder Carrol , consisting of notebook layouts and an encoding system to help a person keep track of their short and long term goals. If you’re new to the concept, I highly recommend watching his introduction video . After a year of experimenting with this, I want to share my method…
I was inspired by the Map of Every Building by the NY Times this a few weeks ago and decided to use the city of Denver’s Building Outlines Dataset to create a map of every building specifically for Denver. Because I had a bit more metadata on the building outlines, I used QGis to create a map that colored different buildings based on their building type. The site. The building outlines dataset has…
I’m currently traveling around Taiwan. Before I arrived, I saw reports of numerous 5.0+ earthquakes hitting the Hualien area . I did a bit of digging into Taiwan’s open earthquake reports to figure out if it was still risky to travel in that area. Getting Data Taiwan’s earthquake data is available on Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau site by month via HTML tables. I used the Selenium Python package…