Author: Matt Chung
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Friday night arguments
My wife’s parents told us that when they first moved in together, they noticed that when they argued with one another, the arguments normally took place on Friday evenings. And when they became aware of this pattern, the two of them agreed to shelve any important discussions for the next day. And surprisingly, this worked…
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Libraries are love
Earlier this evening, I neatly stacked my unbounded 200 page textbook onto the document feeder of a waist high scanner, converting a college Linear Algebra book from physical form into a 40 megabyte colored PDF — all within 3 minutes. And best of all: it was free! That’s right, I didn’t pay a single penny,…
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“I’m not going to raise my kids the way my parents raised me”
We’ve all heard people, including me, say “I’m raising my kids differently” or “I’m never going to raise my kids the way my parents raised me”. I hear that all the time. But, have you ever heard someone say “I’m going to raise my kids just like my parents raised me”. I doubt it. I’ve…
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My first singing (and guitar) recital
This past Saturday, I sang and accompanied myself on the guitar, my first time singing in front of a crowd of about 20 people. I played my arrangement of one of my favorite songs: No Regrets by Mike Love. Leading up to the actual performance, so many nerves and anxiety ran through my body. What…
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Friday donut ritual
Today is donut day! Actually, every Friday is donut day. I started a weekly ritual about six months ago. Every Friday, my entire team (apart from one or two people) rides the elevator from the 13th floor down to the lobby, and then we proceed to take a brisk 2 minute walk Mighty O: Seattle-based…
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Why I love Seattle
I consider Seattle my new home. Perhaps it’s the lack of pretension. Folks around here tend to pragmatically dress themselves: sneakers, blue jeans, puffy Patagonia down jacket. This is unlike how people dress themselves in southern California, where I lived for over 25 years, where the overall vibe is to dress to impress. I admit, I…
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The beauty of dynamic programming
I just discovered dynamic programming and damn, I’m blown away by the concept. The other day, hile working through a homework assignment, I compared the run times between two python functions that I wrote, one function written recursively and the other written in a dynamic programming fashion. Starting with the recursive solution, I arrived at…
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Disabling remote loading of images (in e-mails)
On both my laptop and iPhone, I’ve configured my e-mail clients to disable a setting called “Load Remote Images.” Although there are a number of benefits in doing so, like reducing network traffic (i.e. bandwidth), my main motivation is this: preventing senders from tracking my e-mail behavior, preventing them from identifying whether or not I’ve…
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Why I picked up the guitar
Although I’ve been playing the ukulele for over a year, I decided to pick up the guitar four months ago, when I returned to Seattle after spending the Christmas holidays in sunny southern California. During my visit, my little 13 year old brother and I would occasionally jam. Me on my tenor ukulele strung with…
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Wrapping up discrete mathematics course
Last Friday, I took the final exam for my (distant learning) discrete mathematics course and just now I had logged into the student portal (i.e. Blackboard), surprised to find that my exam had not only been graded but my final grade had been posted as well. I finished the course with an 88%, a B,…
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Graph theory and upcoming final exam
I just scheduled my final exam for my discrete mathematics course, now that I submitted my homework for the final assignment covering graph theory. Throughout this assignment, I was introduced to a variety of concepts: Leonard Euler and his discovery of Euler paths and circuits, Hamiltonian paths and circuits, and a handful of graph related…
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Career contentment
Lately, I’m feeling very content with my career. For the majority of my life, I’ve been constantly searching for some job that would fulfill me. Like many others working in the tech industry, I had a tendency to hop around from company to company every two years, always switching it up, never allowing myself to…
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Software and system ownership
Although I sometimes find getting paged for operational issues enervating, I wouldn’t have it any other way. It’s well known that software engineers at Amazon (Web Services) own their systems, end to end. This means that we not only develop and maintain our software, but we operate the underlying system, complete ownership. From a software…
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Where discrete mathematics meets an interview question
Last week, I was sitting behind my desk at work, surfing hacker news and and at the top of the website floated an article by the co founder of “Daily Coding Program”, a small tech start up that e-mails daily newsletters with a programming question. The article shared some of their insights over the past…
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Blistered fingers
When I first started playing ukulele, about six months ago, I would occasionally wince when lifting my fingers off of the nylon strings. Because in the beginning, the flesh of my fingertips were fresh, no callouses. But slowly, over time, after repeatedly striking down on the strings, my fingers gave birth to a new layer…
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Lessons learned coding the quicksort algorithm in assembly (i.e. MIPS)
About six months ago, I enrolled myself in a computer organization (i.e. CS1410) course offered by University of Northern Iowa and I’m taking it remotely from Seattle, where I work full time as software engineer at Amazon (Web Services). I’ve completed about two thirds of the course, which consists of sixteen homework assignments and three…
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Dog palace
On Saturday, just before the sun began to rise, Jess and I began loading our luggage into black Mazda hatchback for our Christmas trip from Seattle to Los Angeles. Normally, when packing, we haphazardly shove our suit cases into the trunk and squeeze bags between the front and back seats. But this year, we decided…
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Reading my first science fiction book
I just finished reading my first science fiction book! Up until three years ago, I really only read non-fiction books (e.g. The Power of Habit, Outlier) with the single purpose of expanding my intellectual knowledge. I read to increase my depth in a subject (e.g. programming) or read to pick learn about an entirely new…
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Dog done run & pool party
Last Saturday, I woke up at 06:00 AM (about 30 minutes later than I normally wake up on weekdays) and slipped into a striped, cotton t-shirt that my sister bought from target for my last birthday and my favorite knee length corduroy shorts, dressing myself in preparation for a 2 mile, dog friendly run in…
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Practicing my ukulele
Over the past month, I’ve been investing more time in learning the ukulele, sitting in the office area in the morning, strumming and picking my soprano ukulele for at least 30 minutes either in the early mornings or just before hitting the sack. In addition to my daily routine, I’ve not only been taking weekly,…
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Returning to social media?
For the past year and a half, I’ve disconnected myself from all my social media accounts: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. Those platforms still presumably store my data (e.g. posts, images, chat logs) but I no longer log into the system, neither consuming or contributing any content. This disconnect was motivated by several reasons. First, I had…
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A sneak peak of my wedding photos
Although Jess and I legally married six months ago (February) in King County Court, a municipal court in Seattle, we threw our wedding ceremony just three weeks ago. The Saturday ceremony was held in Malibu at Great Spirits Ranch, a ranch that overlooks the Pacific Ocean and Ojai mountains. Most importantly, this venue was dog…
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Caretaking
Every Wednesday morning, I attend therapy. Not the physical kind, where one goes to rehabilitate some injury afflicted by blunt trauma. Rather, I sit in a cushy sofa chair that’s positioned six or so feet away from Roy, my psychotherapist, and I voice not only what I’ve been thinking—the primary focus of cognitive behavioral therapy—since the past…
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Be a man
He wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it – George Orwell Are you a masculine man? How does one even define masculinity? By the American, western definition, a masculine man is someone who carries a heavy beard on his chiseled chin, speaks in a deep Clint-Eastwood voice, commands respect from those around…