Tracking My Working Hours
09 Dec 2020 | technology
I tried out a few Pomodoro apps when I study or do work to stop myself from checking the phone. Most of them are quite similar and offer the same functionalities. But the one I use the most is Forest. It’s the most charming Pomodoro that I keep coming back to. The $1.99 I paid for the app has paid for itself many times over in term of my productivity gain. The interface is clean and simple. I can also tag what the time is being used to do and it breaks down those hours for me in nice graphs.
Read more →Connecting Patterns in Learning
29 Nov 2020 | rants
I recently read an interesting book about learning called A Mind for Numbers by Barbara Oakley. In the book, she explained different strategies that influence learning and how to do it more effectively. One particular phrase stood out to me:
Good chunks form neural patterns that resonate, not only within the subject we’re working in, but with other subjects and areas of our lives. The abstraction helps you transfer ideas from one area to another.
As I read this, I understood that pattern recognition was a vital part of how I learned. The funny thing is that it’s an automatic process. I wish I could do a brain dump of all the information I learned and connect them one at a time.
Read more →Pausing Loops with Await in JavaScript
20 Nov 2020 | programming
When I was working on creating a simple test for my flashcards app, I ran into a problem. I have an object containing the term and answer pairs. The simplest way to go through the test would be to loop through the keys and displays the answer when user clicks on Answer button. The problem was that the loop does not stop on each iteration for the user to select whether their answer was correct or not. I looked up different methods to solve this problem because I wasn’t aware of how asynchronous functions work. Then I stumbled upon a similar StackOverflow question and somebody suggested in the comment to use async.
Read more →Jekyll Flashcards Generator
29 Sep 2020 | programming
The last post I wrote was on March, right before the pandemic happened. I never thought things would change this much in the span of six months. I heard the news about coronavirus going on in China before March but never thought it would hit the U.S. as hard as it did. I’ve just stayed indoor since then most of the time.
In the beginning, I spent a good chunk of that time just playing video games. The news was saying how if everyone practices social distancing and wear masks, the pandemic would be under control in just a couple of months. It’s been six months since then and the number has only been increasing. So now I try to use the time to work on a project that create flashcards using Jekyll and Github Pages.
Here is the link to the project: Jekyll Flashcards
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