Blog

Hello! It’s been a while. I hope you’re doing well. One of my big goals for 2026 is to create more, and one of my favorite ways to create is to write. It’s March, so it feels like high time to get started. To reboot my newsletter, I’ll be sharing some thoughts, plus what I’m reading, watching, or listening to, in a short weekly letter, on Mondays (though if I’m late for that, I’ll probably publish mid-week anyway). Here’s the first edition of The Monday Letter. Enjoy! Put yourself on the critica...

(And how I discovered—I think—the Google Messages Gemini assistant's system prompt.) Gemini is brilliant technology. As the first model to outperform humans on MMLU, with its million-token windows and impressive results on SWE-Bench 2.5—the talented team at DeepMind is achieving remarkable things. So, why hasn't this technical excellence translated into meaningful improvements across Google's product ecosystem? As a long-time Android user (from the HTC era through acquisition—I had the HTC One M...

I need to start with a confession. I don’t actually have a degree yet. But in ten days, I finally will. I know—it’s strange. Haven’t I been working full-time in San Francisco for nearly a year? There's more to the story, of course. Nearly a year ago, I effectively graduated—completing my undergraduate coursework with a final edit to a machine learning survey paper on sparse Mixture-of-Experts (MoEs) (which is most certainly outdated by now). But why didn't I get my degree? It came down to timing...

This winter break, I re-wrote my personal website. It went great. Here’s the behind-the-scenes story. Motivation In the summer of 2020 (—in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, locked in my parent’s basement), I, as a bright-eyed computer science freshman, decided to take on a nobel endeavor: re-writing my personal website. My previous instances (v1, v2, and v3) had used Jekyll (i.e., a lot of mangled HTML and CSS, managed with Ruby). I had recently learned React, and was overall a much more comp...

If I got hit by a bus and forgot everything I knew about computer science [1], here is how’d I re-learn it [2]. Inspired by Robert Heaton’s “Projects for Advanced Beginners” (link) and a bunch of random knowledge I’ve accumulated over time. ‼️ Are you already someone with knowledge in the field of computer science, and looking for resources or opportunities? I encourage you to look at csjobs2 instead. This is my curated list of every-resource-ever I considered in undergrad, and has suggestions f...

A brief guide to GNU's make. ~~Check it out~~ ~~here~~~~!~~ It’s since been migrated here! I used to use make often in small-to-medium sized code snippets in CPSC 213 ("Introduction to Computer Systems") at UBC as a part of the teaching team. Hopefully this guide can serve students well and provide some clarity on this somewhat arcane build tool! Makefiles 🐐 A guide to Makefiles. Designed to be useful for students I taught at the University of British Columbia (UBC), but also hopefully more bro...

In my first year of high school, I had the luxury of spending an all-inclusive weekend in Lacombe, Alberta. In case you’re not familiar, Lacombe is a city in central Alberta, 125 kilometers south of Edmonton and home of the Len Thompson Manufacturing Plant (that part, of course, you already knew). In 2017, it was home to the Alberta Student Leadership Conference. The website is still up, here. I went, starry eyed, to learn how to lead. And learn I did! (My whole leadership experience in high sch...

See your bars broken down right in the browser. Powered by Spotify, Genius, and Google Cloud. Check out the GitHub repository here! Background There are loads of videos online that inspired this project. Take a look at Genius' version, Check The Rhyme, or Vox's, Rapping, deconstructed: The best rhymers of all time. These videos get millions, and I mean millions of hits online. Why? Well, it's fun! And it's cool. The basic concept is that rap lyrics are "broken down" and the rhyming groups are hi...

📅 Despite the edited date, this post was actually written and published on October 29th, 2023. Story time. I'm bad at flying. But I don't mean the act of flying, as a pilot. I mean as a passenger. How can you be bad at packing your bags, going to the airport, filing through security, and hopping on a plane? Great question! I'm not sure, but after reading this, I think you'll be inclined to agree. Right now, I'm sitting in the Victoria airport after trying to board a short-haul flight to my home...