Essays by Ka Wai Cheung
Life Imitates Code
Business & Work
- What's the greatest piece of advice you've ever received?
- Why sports matter to some of us
- Finding comfort in the uncomfortable
- The mythical couch-lift
- Sometimes archaic technology is the most effective kind
- Hiring into boundaries
- The personal lessons I've learned in business
- The overlooked benefits of making yourself busy
- Do what you love, but know what love is
- The face on the other side
- A remote-first approach to the workplace
- Quiet please: The benefits of online chat
- Thinking through your problem
- The by-products are everywhere
- Humility is at the heart of every problem solver
- The golden rule on creating rules
- Create your own sense of urgency
- Who is the new business programmer?
- Being your own boss is about being your own employee
- Building an ISV on top of a client business
Coding
- How about a refactorthon?
- Camraderie and recognition inside the development team
- Make good decisions
- There are rockstars and there are bands
- The unintended byproducts of refactoring code
- Why I (still) write code
- The psychological battle of big refactorings
- Why it is hard to write about code
- An homage to strict coding
- Building the optimal users database model
- Programming's three life lessons
- The least you can do
- A fast code culture
- There will never be a programmer in the White House
- Write code to read it, not bow to it
- Reaching programmer's nirvana
- Legacy code is good for your company culture
- Treat time as an ingredient
Design
- How the evolution of baseball stadiums might inform the future of web design
- Programmers should be a part of the design process
- The fallacy of first impressions
Teaching
- Finding those “clear glue” moments
- A primer on delivering a good presentation
- Give away the punchline
- Teach abstraction through concreteness
- Time your details