(Translated from the Chinese version with the help of Claude. This article talks about translation from English to Chinese, therefore this English version might not make a lot of sense comparing to the original Chinese version.)

A while ago, I happened to stumble upon Yi Zhongtian’s “Philadelphia Storm” that I had previously bookmarked, which recounts the process of the 1787 Philadelphia Constitutional Convention. Since I was planning to visit Philadelphia, I decided to read up and learn about it to enhance my upcoming sightseeing experience (though I later failed to secure tickets to Independence Hall, which is another sad story).

(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.

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

Starting a New Job

This week I started at a new company, and there’s a lot to learn. I estimate this suffocating underwater state will need to continue for about three to four months before gradually improving. Lowering expectations leads to pleasant surprises. But if I’m following Hofstadter’s Law and already expecting surprises, will the surprises still appear?

Last week’s goodbyes to old colleagues were somewhat melancholy, while this week I’m slowly building connections and getting to know new colleagues. What I didn’t expect was that the new company is so large - there are quite a few high school classmates, college classmates, graduate school classmates, and former colleagues at the new company, which actually provides me with opportunities to “renew old friendships” 😊 Life is wonderful - it’s all about fate!

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:

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

Today I had some rare free time, so I decided to string together and record some old stories that I’ve been reminiscing about lately.

Cassette Tapes

Back in middle school, everyone was still listening to music on cassette tapes. Do kids nowadays even know what those are? They looked like this 👇:

Rewinding, getting tapes stuck, flipping sides - these terms are probably going to fade into history. Friends would often exchange tapes to listen to popular songs. The NOW (that’s what I call music!) series was very popular back then, with covers that all looked like this: