George Lee's Blog (13)

“I never want to become a teacher.” — 20 year old me.

I stood at a crossroads as a junior in college. Organic Chemistry had destroyed any hope I had of going to medical school. I had declared Biology as my major, but I began to have second thoughts. I fell back on the thing I was good at, which was Mathematics. Still, I wasn’t sure what I would do with that degree.…

When I first started learning Ruby on Rails back in 2007, one thing was made clear: don’t even try setting it up on a Windows machine. Since then, we had some open source projects like RailsInstaller that make it really easy to set up a development environment on your machine. Also, with the advent of virtual machines…

People who know me know that I’ve been pretty busy lately. People who really know me know that I’m actually slammed. Yet, I’m taking a personal challenge to complete a small application in the month of March. As it turns out, I have an idea for a small bite-sized application that I can build in a month. It’s also a great chance to challenge myself to learn new frameworks and libraries.

The Problem

I’ve…

At the time of this writing, we have had two Nodeschool events here in sunny Honolulu, so tl;dr it’s been pretty successful. Admittedly, I had concerns going in to the first event. Sure, Nodeschool has been successful worldwide with new chapters opening every day, but that doesn’t mean it’d be a guaranteed success. Being the organizer for Ohana.js (our local Javascript…

For whatever reason, testing did not seem to be a focal part of Apple's development tools until Xcode 5. Prior to then, tests were typically implemented using OCUnit, but it was difficult to integrate with the Cocoa framework. That changed in Xcode 5, where OCUnit was swapped out for XCTest…

While looking through some old code, I found my first iOS projects that I did while I was a graduate student at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The earliest of which goes back to November of 2008, which was 4 months or so after the App Store opened its doors (according to Wikipedia). Since then I had developed 3 apps (two ended up in the App Store), the last of which I worked on in 2010.

Whenever…

In Hawaii, we’ve built up our local tech community thanks to efforts from HTDC, HI Capacity, The Box Jelly, and many local companies. We are at the point where community events are happening all the time. We have amazing leaders at the forefront continuing to keep this community active.

I am the organizer for a local Javascript…

Usually, this is a slow news period for technology. But there have been a few high profile tech news stories, from Edward Snowden turning into Carmen Sandiego to the Xbox One-Eighty DRM debacle. But one that perhaps flew under the radar was an…

It has been more than 6 months since I launched RedeemHi5.com, which I wrote about in one of my first blog posts. The launch hasn't been perfect; the most major issue is that the connection to the database gets lost and it doesn't reconnect, thus leaving people with a loading screen. The first thing to do, of course, is to fix it. In addition, though, I wanted to add tests to document these issues and maintain some peace of mind as I…

It wasn't so long ago that functional programming seemed to be an arcane science. If you knew Haskell, Standard ML, or Common Lisp, you've either been programming for a very long time, involved in computer science research, or just had a lot of free time on your hands. However, functional programming has been making a comeback with…

With the new year come new resolutions to become a better person. If you're into software development (or looking to get into it), you may be looking to learn something new. I do believe that one of the most important things we can do as software engineers is to explore other technologies and programming languages. Seeing other approaches gives you additional perspective when trying to approach a problem. In the past, this typically meant picking up a book and spending a few days going…

Over the past year, the City and County of Honolulu and Code for America pushed to make the city's data open to the public. The city has a tight budget and can only dedicate a small amount of resources to the creation of applications using this data, so opening it up allows people in the community to work with this data. Recently, they published a list of their available datasets …

There are several interesting research projects going on in the Department of Information and Computer Sciences (ICS) at UH Manoa, ranging from social network analysis to continuous data processing for mobile applications. Being a recent Master's in computer science graduate, I've heard about many of these projects directly from the professors. While I encourage you to read more about them on the…