Presentation
When I was in elementary school, I had a teacher who taught me a pretty important lesson that I still think about to this day. I should note that elementary...
Lab Work
When people hear the words "lab," especially with respect to the sciences, images of beakers, fume hoods, and glassware strewn about often come to mind. I...
Consistency
This is the 44th time that I am sitting down and writing something on a Sunday. If nothing else, I think I’m a pretty consistent person; I’ve been...
Hard is Concurrent Programming (fuck, it's hot)
12:22 PM. I'm sitting outside on a cafe patio. Depending on what app you ask, the temperature ranges from a breezy 28 °c to 34 °c. Vancouver is in the midst...
Documentation is my Passion
Sunday, June 20th, 2021. 3:40PM I've had a beer, and I'm definitely feeling it right now. It's surprising how buzzed I can get on a 4.67% sour from Taylight...
Week 1 🐦
Last week was my first week at Twitter. I spent most of it setting up my development environment and not doing much else. There were a bunch of corporate...
Cats, Cats, Cats!
This week was supposed to be my first week at Twitter. Unfortunately, there was a shipping snafu and my laptop ended up getting delayed by a week. This meant...
Scala 3, Pisco Sours, and Twitter
Scala 3 The past week was mainly filled with me pouring over the language reference for Scala 3. It was initially supposed to be released sometime last fall,...
Update
I am pretty exhausted, and I don’t think I’ll have enough energy to write an entire newsletter today. I’ll keep it brief with some point-form notes: Last...
My name is
James Yoo. That’s what my friends know me as and call me. Various legal documents know me as Jun Sung Yoo, and somewhere in a database in some lonely data...
I Hate VS Code
Now that school is over, I’ve had some time for leisure. This to me, means spending a couple of days learning a new programming language until I inevitably...
A Return to Aspect-Oriented Programming
Last week, I officially finished up the course component of my Masters degree. Submitting the final report for CPSC 508 felt like a massive weight had been...
Limbo
The time is 8:41 PM on Sunday, April 25, 2021. I almost forgot to write one of these again. I’m seriously giving thought to whether I should start setting...
Pause
Oops, looks like I forgot to write a newsletter yesterday. There goes my streak of Sunday newsletter releases. I honestly thought today (Monday, April 19)...
Final Stretch (Final Version)
We're now nearly halfway through April, and I seriously cannot believe how fast time flew by. I started grad school back in September of last year, this is a...
Final Stretch
The date is April 4, 2021. It's the last month of my first "year" of grad school. As cliche as this sounds, I can't believe how fast time flew by. I spent a...
Vaccination Timeline = Ever Given??
By the time I finish writing this newsletter, a large container ship (the size of 4 football fields. I don’t remember the last time I’ve been to an American...
Goodbye for real, Pinetree Grill
I spent most of my life growing up in Coquitlam, BC. If you don't know where that is, it's a small suburb of Vancouver. It's well known for being right at...
Familiar Faces
It's going to be a short(er) newsletter this week, but there's still stuff to chat about! Back in January, I ordered an ergonomic chair. I've been moving...
To Me, 1 Year Ago From Now
March 2020 The title of this newsletter is a blatant rip-off of the first episode of the series Attack on Titan, but I really couldn't resist given what I'm...
February's Over?
The past week was a busy one, so I’ll try to compress it as much as I can. On Monday, I presented a paper, “When APIs are Intentionally Bypased: An...
Luck
I’ve been thinking a lot recently about the idea of luck and how much bearing it might have on success. Many successful people attribute their place in life...
Reading Week
So, yeah. The image above really sets the tone for this week's newsletter. This past Friday, our first project for CPSC 539: Program Verifiers and Program...
Hey I didn't know Markdown had Support for Footnotes
We are now well into the second month of 2021, and I can say that it's been a busy time so far. I debated not writing a newsletter this week but I thought it...
This is kinda hard
This is probably the latest I've sent out one of these. Honestly speaking, I'm surprised I've kept it up. Last week was a whirlwind of work; I had an...
The Snow that Never Came
There's been a lot of talk over the past few days about the first snowfall of the year; it was projected that 5 to 10cm of snow would fall in Metro...
Milkman! I am no Milkman! I am a South Korean Yakult Lady!
I should first explain the rather nonsensical title. One of my friends who is off doing machine learning (waves hands) showed me this paper published at...
Recording Lectures is (not) my Passion
Last week, I got an email from the prof whose course I'm TA'ing this term: Would you be able to record your C0 tutorial, rather than having us run it in...
Starcraft and the New Year
Happy New Year! Now that we have that out of the day, I have something far more interesting to write about: Starcraft 2 My friends know that I’m not that big...
Matters of the heart (2020 in the rear-view window)
In this newsletter, I won’t be talking about my hopes and dreams for love, but I promise the title isn’t clickbait. Instead, as I look back on a year in...
The end is nigh (that's how you say it, right?)
I almost forgot to write a newsletter today (got bogged down in coursework), but here I am, typing away at the keyboard. This week in First World Problems, I...
I can see the end (almost)
I was really tempted to skip this week’s newsletter, cause that would have meant that I could spend less time in front of my screen typing away. After almost...
Project Month
Around this time last year, the first term of my last year of undergrad was over, and I was probably madly preparing for final exams. Fast-forward to the...
Goodbye November
Today is November 29, and it's nearly the beginning of the last month of 2020. I honestly have a hard time believing that nearly an entire year has passed...
Week ???
Unfortunately, I don't have much to write about this week. For the past few days, I've been running moss on student projects for the course I TA for. I'm not...
Rick Astley and Church Encodings
This past week was both fun and stressful. In this newsletter, I'm gonna move back a bit to the format I had when I initially started writing, i.e. write...
A Return to Programming
This past week was a bit of a blur. With the exception of the obvious (the US Presidential Elections), things were pretty quiet. As courses ramp up and...
The "Fragility" of Science
Yesterday was October 31, 2020. Halloween 2020. The images I posted above would be a common scene on that day any other year. People dressed up as their...
Reflecting on Teaching
For the last two newsletters, I’ve been writing about how I got into CS and some of the decisions that I’ve made to get to this point in my life. Taking a...
How I Got Here (2/n)
Last week I wrote about the first half of my first year at university. I think I ended off right before the beginning of winter break. I guess this week will...
How I Got Here (1/n)
Recently I’ve been reflecting on how I got started in computer science; from a guy whose worst subject in school was math to a first year Master of Science...
The Either Monad
The past week has been pretty quiet. Without a looming CPSC 509 homework deadline, I’ve found that school is somewhat relaxed. I’ll probably regret saying...
Rules and Trees
What a week. I've been consumed for the past few days by CPSC 509, and I can't believe that I even finished it ("finished" might be a bit of a stretch, I do...
Super Mario 64 and Binary Decision Diagrams
Another Sunday means it's time for me to sit down and talk about what happened between the last newsletter and now. I have to say: not much has happened. The...
Help, everything is on fire
Last week was my first foray into grad school and I have to say, it's kinda weird. I thought I'd be used to everything being online (since the last quarter...
Day 0
I've never been one for blogging but I guess this year is as good a year to start as any. There's a lot going on in the world right now: The COVID-19...