by Xiaoyun Yang and Clyde Shaffer

I love indoor plants but I’m bad a keeping them alive. I once had a cactus that died from thirst. I purchased a few Aqua Bulbs, which has been great help in keeping the big plant watered enough for me to get around to taking care of it. However, I can’t use the Aqua Bulb on my smaller plant. Also, Aqua Bulbs break easily and refilling it with water is always a hassle. This motivated me to build an automated plant waterer. Let’s call it ThirstyPlant.

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When I work at my federal job on a close intranet network, we often had to access information from different databases and filesystems through custom or share point websites which did not have the best user interface. It was a pain point for me and many of my colleagues. I decided to make a set of single page applications (SPAs) with nicer UX for querying the databases and file systems.

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It’s not always clear why we need need a personal website. But here’s the truth: we are a product (a brand) with unique skills to offer to prospective employees and customers. A website is an effective medium to let the world know who we are, what we are capable of, and what our values are. Building a personal website has never been easier these days with tools like Hugo.

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I’ve always lived by the “Separation of Concern” principle when it comes to software design. Recently, I’ve came to love a new design pattern for web apps called the isomorphic web app that sacrifices some of the simplicity of a SPA with a backend API for a significant boost in performance.

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I maintain a knowledge repo on Github called coursera-scala-specialization. One reason I chose to learn Scala is that Scala is a good language to learn functional programming and Scala offers full the functional programming support, but it also lets you do imperative programming and object oriented programming, with seamless interoperability with Java. Functional programming is a good paradigm that lets you make programs that are concise and modular. This is important for developer productivity which I care most about at this time.

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Author's picture

Xiaoyun Yang

Software Engineer. Climber. Snowboarder.

Software Engineer

New York