Category: Technology

A data visualization of my clock-checking habits

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For those of you who know me, I love documentation so much that I made it my job. That’s why I was excited to read a book called Dear Data, detailing how two designers — Giorgia Lupi and Stefanie Posavec — mailed each other postcards with hand-drawn data visualizations about their lives. Each week, they designed a new visualization using data they collected for topics such as “things we bought” or “sounds we heard.” I was itching to try this project myself, but documenting the mundane details of my life sounded like a daunting task. Nothing like a good blog post article to push myself to try new things.

Here was my plan:

  1. Choose the data I want to record.
  2. Collect the data in my trusty note-taking app.
  3. Draw the data visualization.
  4. Reflect on the stories and patterns I noticed through the visualization process.
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The puzzle of writing puzzles

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This Princess and the Frog puzzle has gorgeous colors.

Recently, I’ve discovered how important puzzles are in my life. When I decided to try writing a game, I was immediately overwhelmed by how to start. Do I begin with gameplay, characters, world-building, or something else? Then I realized that my favorite games revolve around logical problem-solving, so I should begin by researching the art of making puzzles.

To start with what I know, I mined my past for examples of games and puzzles I’ve enjoyed. From there, my goal was to draw on my own experiences and leverage my existing writing/design skills to create a set of puzzle-writing guidelines.

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Harry Potter and why we play games we hate

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My feelings about Jam City’s Harry Potter: Hogwarts Mystery mobile game can be summarized by this Reddit quote:

“I tell my friends all the time, ‘hey the new HP game is just the worst! Seriously. I play it every day, you should download it. But it’s the worst game I’ve ever played in my life and I absolutely hate it. It’s not fun at all. I play it every day!'”

I found this contradictory love-hate sentiment so fascinating that I had to investigate its cause. There must be some reason that I and so many other Hogwarts Mystery players spend hours playing a game that we complain about daily.

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U for usability: understanding users

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If you work in the tech industry, you might be familiar with the popular buzzword “usability.” Although designers and engineers use this term to evaluate how easy their tools or processes are to learn and use, the strategy for achieving usability can be an abstract mystery.

From the movie Temple Grandin

Here’s the most vivid way I can describe usability in action: in the movie Temple Grandin, the titular character crawls through a claustrophobic tunnel on a ranch where cows are prodded and dipped in pesticide to eradicate ticks. She experiences firsthand the ways in which the tunnel violates cows’ natural instincts, scaring them with glints of lights and unnatural direction changes. Later, Grandin redesigns a slaughterhouse to account for their natural sense of direction, and the cows are gently guided to their deaths. They get a dignified ending, and people can enjoy high-quality beef from relaxed cows.

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Why a writer is a word engineer

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PenTag-01
Hooray for HTML tags. I designed this in Adobe Illustrator.

When I tell people that I consider myself a logical person, they sometimes ask why I’m not more involved in engineering or math. After all, people usually associate “logic” with mathematical proofs that show you how to get from “ABC is a right triangle” to “a2 + b2 = c2.” But math and science don’t have a monopoly on logic. The more I study programming, the more I appreciate writing as a logical activity. Here’s how some principles of logic and engineering apply to the writing process:

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My coding journey thus far

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console.logbunnyI figure the completion of my final assignment this semester for Computer Science 61A (the introductory computer science course at UC Berkeley) is a reasonable checkpoint for me to reflect on my involvement in programming. For our last class project, the last few lines of directions read “Assuming your tests are good and you’ve passed them all, consider yourself a proper computer scientist!” Sadly, I failed all the tests for the extra-credit question. Even if I had aced every problem, I don’t believe that adding tiny bits of code here and there to the massive skeleton provided by the course instructors necessarily qualifies me as a “proper computer scientist.” Heading into the future, I want to cling to Professor DeNero’s hand, crying “Don’t leave me!”

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