Sep 3, 2019

This article is also published at Medium and dev.to

It has been twenty years since I started programming. Today I want to share the story of how I learn to code by building an MMORPG from the ground up 7 times since I was 12 years old. Sounds crazy? Yep, that’s how I did it. It all starts with an MMORPG I like a lot while I was a kid, it’s called Lineage.

Screenshot of Lineage, from Lineage servers shutting down in the West, GameSpot

Back in my day, it was the most popular online game in Taiwan, and surely the most popular one among my classmates. The game was designed to always be exponentially harder to get to the next level from the previous one. As a 12 years old kid, I didn’t have time to get to the top level. So I talked to myself:

...

Aug 25, 2019

This is republished version of Boost Productivity with Showcase-driven Development for Mobile or Front-end App, this article is also published at medium

Building UI is tedious, it takes a long time and many steps to do little modifications and see what it looks like. Especially when there’s a view buried deeply behind many complicated manual steps. Have you ever wonder how to boost your productivity by 10x or more when building UI? Yes, there’s a way - Showcase Driven Development. Now I am going to tell you the secret how I did it.

...

Feb 4, 2019

As a software engineer I found myself pretty often in needs of showcasing a piece of code in a document or presentation. While coding, we have IDE and editor tools like VSCode for highlighting the syntax, to make it more readable. However, for the software not designed for developers, usually there’s no such syntax highlighting feature for code. I think explaining your code and idea is critical for software engineering, so syntax highlighting in documents and presentations is as important as for development. With that in mind, I wrote a piece shell script that helps you syntax highlighting code snippets for MacOS:

function shl() {
    pbpaste | pygmentize -l $1 -f html -O style=monokai -O full=True > /tmp/highlighted-code.html
    open /tmp/highlighted-code.html
}

To use it, you need to install Pygments first, you can run

...

Dec 1, 2018

In recent years, I’ve built many React Native mobile apps and React front-end apps. I kinda like the idea of React component, it’s really nice you have a clean interface for UI views and make them pretty predictable and reusable. Besides React, the most exciting thing I’ve learned from the community is actually Storybooks. I think it’s a game changer and the same idea can be also applied to native iOS development and other UI-based apps, and it can boost development productivity greatly and also bring many other great benefits.

...