Reading Time: 2 minutes Serenity became 4 years old a few months ago, and we are actually expecting our second child this July. Being the 1st generation Chinese immigrants in mid-west, we have some unique challenges such as being the minority in the community. This is not the case in the pre-school/toddler community we sent Serenity to (Hope Montessori

Reading Time: 2 minutes This is a continuation of my earlier post of Tree, recursive function and my dumb mistake. As I said in my last post, my solution was to create hash maps (singleton) to store those for the session. The main motivation was to help out the performance. But I found out it backfired on me, a

Reading Time: < 1 minute The summer is coming. Since we will be free on Saturday mornings, I plan to take my daughter to all the farmers’ market in the area. We have been to Tower Grove before; Creve Coeur just opened the farmers market at the same time (Saturday morning) at the Parkway north middle school parking lot: 181

Reading Time: < 1 minute This is the end of school year, it is also the busiest time for parents and kids. I just realized it this year. As this past week we had two activities for Serenity: besides the Spring musical, we had Spring Performance at Team Central Gymnastics. Yoyo has done this for a year now, I knew

Reading Time: < 1 minute Serenity’s school usually have this Spring Musical, in which each class will take turns and sing two songs. Each year they have a theme. Last year it was about Season. In the May of St. Louis, the weather is almost like summer. Some classes picked Summer, Spring, or Fall, Serenity’s class picked two Winter songs,

Reading Time: 3 minutes Or am I? 🙂 I think I’m a pragmatic programmer. Note this is also a book title I read, by pragmatic (note not agile), I think it’s about balance between software quality, effort and delivery date. It’s also about releasing software with known risks (including bugs) 🙁 I thought about this as I started practicing

Reading Time: 3 minutes (Update 08-30-2014) We went to St. Louis Outlet Mall (the mills) again today. The playground is busier today as this is labor day long weekend. But still fun. We also explored the mall a bit more this time. (Update 07-20-2014) We went to St. Louis Mills today, as I felt it’s might be a better

Reading Time: 2 minutes I have listened to Paul Kemp’s the App Guy Podcast (TAGP) recently, got to know this from @raywenderlich via twitter. Paul’s podcast is not purely technical, it’s more about entrepreneurship, and start own business. It’s an interview format. Paul usually asks indie developers (iOS, web, etc.) questions on how they get started, any pain points

Reading Time: < 1 minute So I was able to fix that performance problem I mentioned in my previous post. But I inadvertently introduced a new problem in my previous fix. And here is the gist of how I did: while (some condition) { if(some other condition) { … return; } } Guess what, I was able to put it

Reading Time: < 1 minute Tree data structure is fairly common in software development, and luckily I have quite a bit experience working on those in my career. I started working on this as I was working for UGS/Siemens PLM Software, and I was involved in the development of XML based data adapter for CAD data exchange, a key piece