Uncovering your own strengths and weaknesses is tough. In Chinese-speaking culture, it’s rare to hear someone genuinely praise a specific skill of yours. In fact, I often observe a tendency where people self-deprecate just to avoid seeming ostentatious. I’ve always been that kind of person, too, but recently I've been trying to change.
*The Essence of Failure* is a renowned book in Japan. By analyzing various defeats of the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy during World War II, the authors hold up a mirror showing how an organization gradually undermines itself through its systems, culture, and processes.
You should only focus on pixel perfection when it truly matters; otherwise, it often results in a lose-lose situation.
If you are genuinely curious about what others think, you've likely mastered the essence of communication. If you often think everyone else is an idiot and only your solution is right, chances are you haven't yet learned how to communicate.
Thoughts on interviewing candidates
Usually, the thought that "introducing a new technology" will solve existing problems mostly means that the developers haven't thought things through clearly enough. Realizing this, however, takes time—from a wide-eyed youth whose eyes sparkled at every new shiny tech to a seasoned, world-weary middle-aged uncle.
Custom keyboards are a lot like luxury watches: once you start obsessing over them, they stop being mere tools and turn into collector's items.
A reflection on how music has shaped me throughout my life. Only as an adult did I realize what a blessing and rare privilege it was to pick up an instrument as a kid—not only did you have endless free time, but what you build from childhood feels completely different from trying to learn later in life.
This story comes from one of my favorite book series growing up—the stories of *The Fifth Discipline*. As a kid, I naturally had no concept of organizations or teams; I simply loved the stories. Little did I know that as I grew up, I'd realize these stories were entirely about teams.
Growing up, my family wasn't well-off, and life wasn't easy. Without financial support, your choices become very limited. Yet in an environment like this, I still...
This concept is a business strategy for creators (such as artists, writers, musicians, and makers). It argues that creators do not need to become global superstars or amass millions of followers; they only need a dedicated group of loyal supporters to make a steady living and sustain their creative work.
In web development, while traditional HEX and RGB color notations are widely used, they suffer from poor readability and a lack of intuition, and their expressiveness is limited in wide-gamut color spaces like P3. HSL (Hue, Saturation, Lightness) offers a more intuitive way to define colors, making it much easier for developers to understand and tweak them. By describing colors across three dimensions—hue, saturation, and lightness—HSL makes color adjustments far more human-friendly. This is especially true in design systems, where HSL does a much better job representing brightness variations across a color palette.
Posts that I consider genuinely useful—and which used to be easily findable via basic keyword searches before being de-indexed—were wiped out by Google overnight. It made me realize all too clearly that I can't rely solely on Google's SEO traffic for visibility.
Nassim Taleb, author of *The Black Swan*, once introduced a concept: events that seem utterly impossible happen when we least expect them, and for the most part, we cannot predict them—yet they carry an immense impact. COVID-19 in 2020 was the quintessential example: the pandemic completely transformed the way people live and work, and countless businesses folded under the strain, with things only beginning to turn around in 2023.
Instead of forcing myself to set rigid goals this year, I want to take a different approach to reflect on my 2024 and share my hopes for 2025. Moving forward to become a better version of myself.
In today's fast-paced modern society, many people continually extend their working hours and drain their physical resources in pursuit of career success. This realization usually hits around age thirty, primarily because that's when the body starts showing signs of wear and tear.
We really need to talk about imposter syndrome. In this post, I'll share my experiences and how I've learned to overcome it.
Life is not fair
In today's society, many people fall into a common misconception—believing that the time and effort invested in work should be directly proportional to their income. This was also a trap I fell into during the early stages of my career...
Still, seeing that others have it harder or worse than ourselves doesn't seem to make us feel any better. Many people's mindset stops right here: whenever they see someone doing better or being more successful, they start blaming their humble origins or bad luck, lying flat early on, and attributing all their misfortunes to the government and external circumstances. My experience over the past few years has taught me that while luck is outside our control, there are things we can do to increase the likelihood of good luck occurring.