
A couple of friends and I decided around a month ago that we wanted to get better at
drawing, so we decided to embark on one of those "draw one
thing every day for 365 days" projects. Well, if we're being realistic, for 
*approximately* 365 days&mdash;we even named ourselves "Approximately 1095" 
(1095 = 365 x 3).

It's been really fun so far:

<div class="left" style="width: 45%; padding: 0 0 0 10px; float: left;"><img src="/images/posts/painting/billgates.jpeg"></div>
<div class="right" style="width: 45%; padding: 0 30px 0 0; float: right;"><img src="/images/posts/painting/insidejoke.jpg"></div>
<div style="clear:both;"></div>

(I'll write up a separate post later about how/where I'm posting these!)

One day I woke up to discover that my friend Jack had, that
morning (on mostly a whim), gone out and purchased a set of painting supplies
and was happily painting away on an easel in front of the bay windows in
his room.

I thought that was pretty amazing and was inspired to do the same. As much as
I like drawing and sketching, the lack of color is sometimes a bit depressing.
I've always wanted to experiment with painting (having done digital/Photoshop
painting but never physical painting), and decided to try it out<sup>1</sup>!

## Color mixing

The day my acrylic paints arrived (2-day Amazon Prime, ftw), I sat down and practiced
mixing a bunch of colors to get a feel for the ratios and color combinations.
And it's a good thing I did, because I instantly made the newbie mistake of squeezing
out entirely too much dark paint (a dark pigment like red will overwhelm a
lighter one like yellow; 90% yellow + 10% red is basically already dark orange).

I ended up with a bunch of index cards with color gradients, much like a [Pantone]
catalog. Pretty fun. I actually like using physical paints a lot more than
using a digital color picker, since the colors blend together pretty
interestingly when painted, and aren't just one flat color.

<div class="left" style="width: 42%; padding: 0 0 0 50px; float: left;"><img src="/images/posts/painting/painting-1.jpg"></div>
<div class="right" style="width: 42%; padding: 0 50px 0 0; float: right;"><img src="/images/posts/painting/painting-2.jpg"></div>
<div style="clear:both"></div>

## First painting!

The prompt of the day for our drawing project was "mermaid" and I knew I
wanted to paint a landscape (so hard to mess up!), so I decided to paint the
underwater castle from the Little Mermaid.

The hardest part was probably being too scared to paint over things that
I had already painted in the background (no undo or layers?!). It was really
fun though.

<img src="/images/posts/painting/painting-5.jpg">

<div class="left" style="width: 42%; padding: 0 0 0 50px; float: left;"><img src="/images/posts/painting/painting-3.jpg"></div>
<div class="right" style="width: 42%; padding: 0 50px 0 0; float: right;"><img src="/images/posts/painting/painting-4.jpg"></div>
<div style="clear:both;"></div>

Highly, highly recommend picking up painting as a hobby. It's relatively cheap
(I got everything for around $50-60 on Amazon), and it's super fun and
relaxing/therapeutic to be swirling paint around for a couple of hours. Not
to mention you get an awesome physical piece of art that you can then decorate
with, gift, or hide in your closet.

I decided to start off with acrylic because watercolor is really hard to
control or recover from mistakes with, and oil has a messier cleanup, but it's
really up to your own preference. Enjoy!

I hope to be posting more about the rest of my painting adventures soon! (:

**1**: I'm still continuing the drawing project, I'll just substitute paintings in
every once in a while.

[Pantone]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantone


Painting Adventures


As you may or may not have noticed, this blog has recently undergone a pretty drastic change. Aside from pure design upgrades, I've moved off Wordpress (good riddance!) and joined the geek bandwagon by writing my blog with [Jekyll](https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll). Here's my obligatory "I moved to Jekyll" blog post!

## Why Jekyll?
- **Wordpress is bloated.** I've never even used a third of the features&mdash;I wanted something super simple and lightweight that I could gradually add onto (if I wanted to).
- **Custom styling.** Wordpress, I've found, is a nightmare to try to style. There are layers upon layers of templates, and I really hate trying to navigate through PHP code. Jekyll, by contrast, is a lot cleaner and easier to deal with.
- **Markdown/Vim > Wordpress editor.** I've gotten to the point where I basically need to use Vim for everything (code, obviously, but also notes, to-do lists, etc). Markdown is great, and I like how all of my blog posts are now under version control.
- **Static pages.** Blogs are almost pure static content (with the exception of comments, search, etc), so I figured that it would be simpler (and faster) to just have an entirely static site. This makes deploys super easy as well.

## My setup

I'm not going to go through in depth how I got my Jekyll set up, because there are [more](http://paulstamatiou.com/how-to-wordpress-to-jekyll) [than](http://vitobotta.com/how-to-migrate-from-wordpress-to-jekyll/) [enough](http://alexeymk.com/2012/07/01/moving-to-github-pages-and-jekyll.html) of those guides out there. Here are some of the main components that I used:

- Standard boilerplate from [Tom Preston-Warner](https://github.com/mojombo/mojombo.github.com) himself, with [pagination](https://github.com/mojombo/jekyll/wiki/Pagination).
- Category generation plugin from [Recursive Design](http://recursive-design.com/projects/jekyll-plugins/).
- [Disqus](http://disqus.com/) for comments. I don't really buy into the whole argument against using Disqus for static sites (that it defeats the purpose of having a static site).
- RSS feed template from [Recursive Design](http://recursive-design.com/blog/2010/09/14/integrating-jekyll-with-feedburner/).

All of the templates and styles are handwritten. Being able to customize all aspects of the blog is definitely one of the major perks of using Jekyll!


Goodbye, Wordpress!


Matt Might's ["What every computer science major should know" article](http://matt.might.net/articles/what-cs-majors-should-know/) is fantastic. I regret not reading this article in the beginning of the holiday break, but I guess I can use this as sort of a "2012 CS Resolutions" list since everyone seems to be making New Years resolutions right about now.

1. **Master LaTex**
    
    In school, I never really used LaTex for typing up assignments until last semester for our project design docs. I actually don't know how feasible this will be to do now that I'm in the "real world", but I'll take any chance I can get to write up documents in pretty LaTex! 
2. **Be better at UNIX/Sysadmin-ing** 
    
     Being traditionally a frontend person, I don't have a crazy amount of experience working with command line or doing sysadmin-y things. Sure, I know how to do some elementary things and I'm a vim fanatic (by the way, vim > emacs). However, I'd like to be able to count myself as an expert at writing shell scripts or configuring a web server. 
3. **Learn a couple of new languages** 
    
     Not for the sake of "adding new languages on my resume", which is absolutely useless, but for exploring and mastering new programming paradigms. A few that sparked my interest/I've been meaning to pick up: Scala, Haskell, Erlang. 
4. **"Understand a computer from the transistors up"** 
     
     Being an EECS major has exposed me to all of the "levels" of a computer, but I never took much effort in trying to piece things together and much of my EE knowledge is long forgotten. 
5. **Get some hands-on experience with Operating Systems** 
    
    The semester I took it, Berkeley dramatically changed their traditional Operating Systems class into a hybrid (read: less in-depth/useful) systems class that covered minimal multi-programming and memory/scheduler topics but didn't actually give us any practical experience with how operating systems work. In particular, I'd love to learn more about file systems and possibly tinker around with the Linux kernel. 
6. **Catch up on reading systems papers** 
    
    I have a giant list of systems papers to go through/that I semi-went through during winter break courtesy of my friend [Sunil](http://pedapudi.posterous.com/) and the [graduate cloud computing course](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~istoica/classes/cs294/11/) at Berkeley. In addition, [Stripe](http://www.stripe.com) has super cute academic paper reading lunches, which I'm really excited about! I'm sure this will be an easy resolution to keep up with. (: 

After reading the article, I'm not super satisfied with what I learned in my 3.5 years as a Berkeley EECS major. I'm looking forward to filling in the gaps now that I've graduated!




2012 CS Resolutions


I know I always write a post like this every couple of months or so, but I swear I'm coming back to blogging soon! 

It's my (probably) my last semester at Berkeley, and I'm really excited and terrified at the same time. My workload this semester is intentionally light (well, "light" by Berkeley EECS standards) because I want to focus more on working on awesome side projects, but I've still been bogged down with projects and interviews. 

I'm currently taking [CS162](http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs162/fa11/), which was originally the upper-division OS course at Berkeley but now is an "introduction to systems" course, and a crazy fun experimental [Programming in the Cloud](http://db.cs.berkeley.edu/w/cs-194-17-programming-the-cloud/) class which focuses on distributed systems programming. Both of these classes have got me thinking about what I actually want to do when I graduate, because although I've primarily been a frontend person (go look at my portfolio), I'm super interested in databases and distributed systems and would love to learn more about these topics. 

And speaking of graduating/jobs, I got my first ever full-time offer last week, from Google! I've also been going on a ridiculous amount of interviews with other large companies (Facebook, Microsoft, etc) and small startups trying to find a project I could be passionate about. Who knows, who knows. 

Also - sorry, this post seems to be very scattered; I'm tired from working on my CS162 project - I went to my last ever (tear) Yahoo hackathon a couple of weekends ago, and we had a blast building a multiplayer/realtime WebGL Bomberman game called [Bombermen](http://www.amberfeng.com/projects/bombermen). We won an honorable mention and I'm currently in the process of cleaning up the code (JavaScript at 3am = messy, unorganized JavaScript), so keep a lookout for a demo on my portfolio and/or HackerNews sometime soon!



Sorry for the long hiatus!


> Being a designer is like being Priest in an MMO.

This is probably the nerdiest and geekiest thing I've ever said, but it's totally true. As far as I've seen (or maybe this is just in Berkeley), there's a disproportionate ratio of designers to developers so I'm constantly being called on by startups or project teams looking for UX work.

I'm definitely not complaining - this is awesome news for me. But it's a little lonely not knowing too many other designers in the area, and I'd love to be able to collaborate on projects or bounce ideas off another design-minded person. I got my first taste of this at my internship where there's an actual UX/design engineer on the team, and I have to say that I loved the experience!

So if there are any budding or veteran designers who go to Berkeley or are in the area, just holler. (:


Being a Designer


During the last couple of weeks I've been reading [97 Things Every Programmer Should Know](http://techbus.safaribooksonline.com/book/programming/9780596809515) online, it's a great book full of interesting and enlightening articles.

One that stuck to me in particular was #8 - The Boy Scout Rule. From the real-life Boy Scout rule "always leave a place cleaner than you found it", Robert Martin proposes a parallel to programming projects:

> Always check in a module cleaner than when you checked it out.

Not making the code perfect, but taking a few moments to clean something up, whether it be abstracting a long method into several methods, documenting a line of obscure code, or changing a variable name to be more clear.

This way, rather than a codebase becoming messier and more outdated over time, it would be more maintainable and lead to a team working together to help improve eachothers' code (and actually knowing how other peoples' parts are implemented).

What a refreshing concept.


The Boy Scout Rule


Abstract Syntax Trees. Target lists. Augassigns. Function types.

This semester I took a compilers course with [Professor Hilfinger](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~hilfingr/), who, despite his formidable reputation, quickly became my favorite professor at Berkeley. During the course of the semester, my group of four and I wrote a Python compiler in C++ basically from the ground up (in three parts, each around 200-300 hours each) - the reason I haven't blogged since February! I'm looking forward to learning more about compilers and now it's summer so I'll have plenty of time to blog again! (:

On my todo list this summer:

- Fun side project: Javascript HTML5 Canvas Physics engine project (possibly to be ported later to WebGL) with my friend [Franklin Hu](http://thisisfranklin.com/). We started a bit yesterday, it's pretty fun so far (until we get to the really really hard physics).

  Follow our [GitHub](https://github.com/franklinhu/gohan) if you're interested!

- As an undergraduate researcher in UC Berkeley's AMPLab, I'll be working on the CrowdDb project - check out their [SIGMOD paper](http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~franklin/Papers/CrowdDBSigmod11.pdf).

- Fun side project: Augmented Reality Android LaserTag/FPS game (probably too ambitious, but we'd love to give it a shot).

- Finish reading Javascript: The Good Parts, and Smashing Book 2 (that I got for Valentine's day!)

- Fun side project: Some kind of Android app for my new Galaxy Tab that I got from Google IO 2011!


A busy semester..


Wow, I haven't written in here in a loooong time (over 2 months!).

School is getting crazy busy, between taking 3 upper div classes (which I love), TAing the [Software as a Service course](http://inst.eecs.berkeley.edu/~cs169/fa10/) here at Berkeley, co-facilitating a [web design](http://decal.aw-industries.com/) class, undergraduate-researching over at the [RAD Lab](http://radlab.cs.berkeley.edu/), and hacking on some awesome personal projects (but that's a story for another post).

Oh, and I'm flying up to Seattle next week for another Microsoft interview - exciting! After midterms have somewhat calmed down, I've decided to make a list of things that I'd like to hack on by the end of Christmas break.

1. **Read more papers.** I've been inspired by my friend Sunil to read more research papers about everything.

   I'm feeling a little lame for not knowing too much about anything non-frontend-web-related. Currently on my list: Above the Clouds, Cassandra, BigTable, MapReduce, Spark, and Nexus (these last two and Above the Clouds are papers from the RAD Lab!).

   Any other suggestions?

2. **Hack on something in Python.** All of our projects in CS188 (Artificial Intelligence) are coded in Python, and I think I'm falling in love. I feel like I'm cheating on Ruby a little bit (this blog is even cleverly named after Ruby on Rails), but Python is pretty much the perfect combination of every programming language I've ever liked. Maybe I'll change my mind as I work with it more?

3. **Contribute to some open source project(s).**

4. **Work on a personal project non-web-frontend-related.** I really need to get out of my comfort zone.


CS "Bucket List" 11/15


Although I've been working with CSS and Javascript for quite some time, I still regard myself as a semi-beginner in terms of deeply understanding the foundations of these two languages.

Therefore, I've taken it upon myself to learn as much as I can this summer (as long as I have a free [Safari Books Online](http://techbus.safaribooksonline.com/home) subscription from my internship, haha)! I did a brief Google search and found an almost unanimous agreement on which are the "best" books to read on these topics:

## CSS

  * [CSS: The Definitive Guide](http://www.amazon.com/CSS-Definitive-Guide-Eric-Meyer/dp/0596527330) by Eric Meyer
  * [Pro HTML/CSS Design Pattern](http://www.amazon.com/Pro-CSS-HTML-Design-Patterns/dp/1590598040)s by Michael Bowers
  * [CSS Mastery](http://www.cssmastery.com/) by Andy Budd
  * [Bulletproof Web Design](http://www.amazon.com/Bulletproof-Web-Design-flexibility-protecting/dp/0321346939) by Dan Cederholm

## Javascript

  * [Pro Javascript Design Patterns](http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Design-Patterns-Recipes-Problem-Solution/dp/159059908X) by Ross Harmes and Dustin Diaz
  * [Javascript: The Good Parts](http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596517748) by Douglas Crockford
  * [Javascript: The Definitive Guide](http://www.amazon.com/JavaScript-Definitive-Guide-David-Flanagan/dp/0596000480) by David Flanagan

Have your own favorite CSS/Javascript books? Or even just fantastic general web design books, guides or tutorials? I'd love to hear about them!



←

general