(Translated from the Chinese version with the help of Claude.)

On Monday morning while commuting on the train, I took out my e-reader and continued reading Hofstadter’s “I Am a Strange Loop” (setting a flag here - I should write a review later). In Chapter 18, the author uses the relationship between regions and ethnicities as an analogy for each person’s body and mind. He mentioned that Poland’s territory has been partitioned multiple times throughout history¹, but the Polish people still exist. The first line of the Polish national anthem is “As long as we live, Poland will not perish!”

(Translated from the Chinese version with the help of Claude.)

In the second half of last year, I visited several nearby ruins. I had planned to write about these trips, but due to my chronic procrastination, I kept putting it off until I almost gave up. Recently, I discovered a treasure of a content creator, An Zhengming. An article on Zhihu describes her as belonging to the “ruins painting school.” She wrote Non-Mainstream Art History, which includes several sections specifically about ruins. So, I thought I’d strike while the iron is hot and finally write about my visits to these ruins. Although the stories behind these ruins may not compare to those of ancient Greece or Rome, they have their own unique charm.

On 8/25/2022, Heroku announced that they are shutting down their free tier products, which include the free tier dyno that Bara runs on. As a result, http://bara.davidfeng.us/#/ starts returning 503 from 11/28/2022.

I built Bara, a Yelp-clone full stack site, as my final project from App Academy in 2017. It probably helped me get my first software engineer job at Oracle. I would like to thank Heroku/Salesforce for letting me using their free tier product for more than 5 years (2017-2022). I know this day would come eventually but when it actually came, I still felt sad.

Today I decided to figure out what are the differences between vegan and vegetarian diets. Google pointed me to this page which contains the following table:

While the information is very detailed and helpful, IMHO the table could use some better design. So here is my revised version:

In English, when people don’t understand what you are saying, they might say “it’s Greek to me”. We can represent this relationship with a direct edge from an English node to a Greek node. This Wikipedia page collects similar idioms in various languages. We can construct a graph from this!

Notable Previous Works

I was excited about this brilliant idea until I googled ‘greek to me graph’. Of course, people have already done it. This post (2015) shows how to use python to parse the Wikipedia page and generate the graph, highly recommended.

(Adapted from an internal talk)

The tech world has seen a lot of talking about agile/scrum, almost to the point that it is the silver bullet for software engineering. The new meaning is even in the definitions that google gives.

On the contrary, some people absolutely hate it, some say that process matters far less than everyone pretends it does (which I agree). I also saw a very interesting theory from HackerNews: the agile process improves the productivity of a C-level developer, but it slows down your A-level developer at the same time, so everyone ends up at B-level. Since C-level developers are much more common than A-level ones, the overall gain is positive.