CollisionViz is a data visualization app which shows car crashes in the New York City. I wrote it when I was at AppAcademy in 2017. Since then, I haven’t spent a lot of time on it. Recently I found out that it stopped working. Software is like cars - it needs maintenance. In addition to fixing it, I gave it an overhaul. Below are some advice that I wise I knew when I first wrote CollisionViz, and hopefully it is applicable to other new programmers.

The Moat engineering team has a cart-and-learn every Friday, where an engineer shares something work unrelated. In December I gave a presentation about chemistry (of course). Below is the slides, check it out!

I published this article on codeburst/Medium on 2018/01/28. It has received 12.6k views and 1.96k claps as of 2019/01/05.

My first full stack project is Bara, a single-page Yelp clone. After weeks of development and refactoring, I am pretty happy with the result. The UI looks good; the functionality works fine: users can sign up, log in, CRUD businesses and reviews.

Recently I’ve been reading Clean Code, and I begin to appreciate the importance of keeping the code clean. Programmers are authors; the code is like books we write, except our reader almost never begin to read from page 1. Usually the reader directly dives into a module/component to fix a problem or add a feature. To help the reader (could be your teammate, or even future you!), it is the author’s responsibility to make sure that the code is easy to read (and to change, but that’s another big topic). Martin Fowler said:

Note: I published this article on codeburst/Medium on 2017/07/30. It has received 18.3k views and 235 claps as of 2019/01/05.

What should be put in the onClick={…}?

A simple example: Toggle button

This example is from React Docs, see it on codepen here.

In the Toggle class, a handleClick method is defined as an instance method, which changes the local state. In the render method, this.handleClick is passed to the button as an event handler. Finally, do not forget to bind this to handleClick in the constructor.

Happy New Year!

My current personal portfolio site hasn’t seen major changes since its inception about 1.5 years ago. I’ve been working as a software developer for a year and I think the site deserves a major upgrade.

I learned about static site generator a couple of days ago, and it seems like exactly what I need. Since I am learning golang, I decided to give Hugo a try. After going through Mike Dane’s Hugo tutorial (highly recommended. It seems that you don’t really need to know a lot of golang to use Hugo) and some setup, my new personal website is live at https://beta.davidfeng.us/ now! I plan to move it to https://davidfeng.us/ once I think it’s in a better shape.