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The Beginning & The end Things I started in 2021 Move from Chicago to Suburbs Run 50% of the days Bake sourdough bread Get a driver’s license and buy a car Video for how a day looks like as a software engineer Things start doing more in 2021 Learning Macro Encomny, e.g CPI and ECI Attend zoom meetings with domain experts in the medical field and economic field Take care of mental and physical health New things I wanna try in 2022 Get back to the basics with CS algorithms Live a sustainable life Read 20 books this year Start traveling again

The Problem Search Engine Optimization(SEO) has been one of the problems because of the increasing adoption of Single Page Application (SPA) for front-end development. SPAs are heavily dependent on client-side rendering, while Search Engine bots are making slow progress on JavaScript execution on their side. Google, the leading search engine service, has been making a lot of promises in the past that their bots could render the SPA client-side rendering results with dynamic rendering. However, the previous experience has shown that it can take 14 days or more to get new content to be indexed in those situations. For other search engines, roadmaps to know when they are going to support client-side rendering (via their crawlers) are not known. ...

It has been quite a journey since we released Order Status, a feature that will allow our customers to check their order details on delivery day, get updates about their order via push notifications in both Android and iOS app, and receive an email with invoice pdf attachment when the order is packed. Push Notifications for Order Status In the past, some customers, including me, would notice that we didn’t get an SMS message when the was soon to arrive. Sometimes, due to mobile services throttling SMS, messages would not arrive until hours after the delivery was completed. While looking for a better way to deliver SMS messages, we decided to also try sending Push Notifications and open another channel of communication to our customers. We decided that we would use Push Notifications to send messages when a driver is delivering your order and another when the driver has arrived. ...

Food & Cooking Exploring different cuisines and cooking in different ways have been the main theme for my year of 2017. I’ve tried different kinds of meal plans which are Blue Apron, Peapod and Home Chef. It’s fair to say that Home Chef is my favorite considering I tried to cook more than 60 recipes from Blue Apron, more than 20 recipes from Home Chef, only 1 recipe from Peapod. I wish that I could try more recipes from Peapod, but it is just not as appealing as the options. It has a long way to go to get to point that the presentation is good enough to courage consumers to take actions. As for Blue Apron, I really like the recipes they provided, and I’m usually getting good result and learning different kind of produce, spices which I would never consider using. However, their warehouse is just too far away from Chicago, and it is making the produce are not fresh enough when they are delivered. Home Chef is an Illinois based small company, but their recipes are as good as Blue Apron’s, the food they delivered is always fresh and well packaged. I had lots of good meals, and lots of fun making the meal. ...

Update: A chrome extension made using the same technique is available on Google web store now. Like a lot of people working in this industry, I prefer dark themes. If you were to ever look at my iTerm or Sublime Text windows, you would understand how pretty dark theme can be. My iTerm 2 Screenshot A few weeks ago, I came across an blog written by Heydon Pickering (https://inclusive-components.club/a-theme-switcher/), which describes a simple tweak to overwrite the current styles to get a dark theme and provides instructions for a React component to switch it on or off. The idea is neat and requires little time to implement and maintain. As a side note, I am also reading one of Heydon’s books entitled Inclusive Design Patterns, which is worthy of any front-end developer’s time. ...