Timothy Gu

Junior Year

Fri, 16 Oct 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This semester, I have entered into the third year of my high school career. It has been a very different experience compared to my last two years, and I think it’s worthy of a blog post so that I don’t forget about this special year in the future.

IB – The Source of Woe

My school offers a program called International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme. For those of you who live in North America, this term may sound pretty foreign. Basically, IB DP is a two-year program for academically talented students during their last two years in high school. To get this diploma, one has to take 6 college-level IB courses (similar to AP courses in the U.S. and Canada), with at least 3 of them being two-year “Higher Level” courses, write an extended essay during the second year of IB, and participate in activities that demonstrate creativity, action, and service (“CAS”).

Before signing up for the program, I’d heard of both compliments and criticisms – usually the former around “preparations for college” and the latter around “homework” – but I eventually decided to join since most of my friends are, and because I believe I am academically capable of the IB workload.

Unfortunately, the college-level courses are much more difficult than I anticipated them to be: especially the humanity ones, which constitute the majority of my four higher-level courses. I have never been an outstanding writer, and this year’s IB English course (which corresponds roughly to AP English Language) is much harder than last year’s, and places more emphasis on writing. IB History (equivalent to AP US History) has driven me to sleep at 4am on one occasion. IB Philosophy will be my second-ever non-A on my high school report card at the end of this quarter (today).

Sounds tough, doesn’t it…

But never for a second did I regret making the choice of taking IB a few months ago.

IB – The Call to Grow

There are a few things in which IB does very well on its mission to prepare us for the next stage of life. I guess this transition will happen sooner or later, and as with everything, better sooner than later.

The first thing that comes to my mind is how IB forces me to organize my time wisely. Students always face the choice between working and procrastinating, and the Timothy of last year frequently chose the latter. Since there wasn’t much homework anyway, I often got away with it. This year, the choice has morphed beyond homework schedule, into “sleep” versus “no sleep.” I assume this is how it’s like in a competitive college.

Which brings my second point. IB knows what colleges are like, and the Programme really prepares us for the hustle-bustle we will encounter in less than two years. Not only is the workload something IB tries to imitate colleges, but the format of the classes too. For example, I have to write papers for IB math class that feels really college-y with proper fonts, format, and such. For IB Physics, my other HL course, the way we calculate uncertainties and errors will carry through into college, according to my teacher at least.

The extended essay we are going to write next year is a prime example of such preparation IB emphasizes. I am not sure about the details of it yet, but I have a feeling that it will be something I’ll be proud of, just like a college student with his successfully defended thesis.

IB – CAS

The only piece of puzzle I’m not very sure of currently is the CAS requirements. Basically the CAS requirement is composed of loggable hours of different activities in the three categories of CAS: creativity, action, and service.

This year, I have started a classical guitar club at my school. My vision of the Classical Guitar Club of SM extends beyond just fulfilling the requirements for CAS (as I hopefully will explain in another blog post if I have the time for it), but I consider club leadership to be a form of creativity (and I hope IB will too).

For action, I am not 100% sure since I’m more of a sedentary person. I do enjoy going outdoors but with me living at a host family, that is unfortunately not always possible. I also used to run (not competitively), but with my schedule overflowing I am having trouble finding time for that. Same goes for golf.

The last one, service. I mean, I enjoy service to all kinds of things: environment, children, elders; but the problem is that I can never find friends with similar interests. Plus, my friends and I often have very different schedules after school and during weekends, and it’s no fun to go somewhere on my own just for fulfilling requirements, which is not the original intentions of CAS anyway.

Other Classes

Beyond the ones I just mentioned, I am taking AP Computer Science, which is my easiest class right now because right now all we do is Java programming. No computer science at all.

Spanish is not a problem either because of our very slow pace through the textbook, which miraculously we finished last year.

Classes I Want to Take

I love science. I love math. I want to take EVERY SINGLE ONE OF SCIENCE CLASSES offered by our school.

But no, I can’t do that.

Let’s do the math. Next year, I am certain about my 4 sets of HL classes; AP Calculus, which is de facto mandatory for engineering schools; Theory of Knowledge as part of the IB requirements next year; and Spanish SL to fulfill my IB requirement and four-year foreign language “recommendation” by colleges. We can take 7 classes per year*, that leaves me to … guess what … 0 empty spots! This means that I will never be able to take a second college-level science class. NOOOOO!

* Plus an optional college-level music class, which I tried to take this year, but the school didn’t open that class because too few people want to take it.

PIxEL

Another source of fun (and work) originates from my role as the Director of Technology at the PIxEL Foundation, a non-profit started by my friend Ethan Lee.

PIxEL stands for “programmers + innovators * entrepreneurs + leaders”. Last year, PIxEL was just another club on campus where we taught our peers on how to use HTML and CSS to MAKE SOMETHING on computer, and to more enlightened ones bits and pieces of JavaScript. Unfortunately, the rest of what PIxEL tries to be was not very much covered. But the relative success of the club kept us going, and the long-time members of the club (including me) formed a more close-knitted group.

This year, we are shifting gears to become a more mature and sustainable organization. First, we are officially a non-profit 501(c)3 corporation, thanks to the great work from the Director of Finances Albert Lee* and his supportive parents. On programming, we are trying to continue our tradition of after-school club meetings, but we are going to expand to hosting more weekend workshops and even hackathons for making an entire project. On our mission to bring entrepreneurship to everybody, we are now also partnering with MIT Launch, which is an incubator of computer projects. We are also trying to bring our love for computer science and the hope of entrepreneurship to younger people (like middle schools) and the less fortunate (Title 1 schools).

All in all, we are really taking off this year, and we have high hopes for everything we are doing.

* Despite their last name, Albert is not related to Ethan.

Moving On

This year surely will be an unique and unforgettable experience for me. Surely I don’t have everything planned out, and there will be some obstacles along the road, but I’m sure with every experience I will learn and grow a bit, and be a little more prepared for the future. And that’s what matters.

Node.js

Sat, 24 Jan 2015 00:00:00 +0000

Introduction

Some time last semester, I first heard about Node.js from a friend of mine who really likes doing web stuff. Our conversation were something like:

TG:: Hey Ethan I am trying to rewrite the FFmpeg FATE website in something faster than Perl CGI.
EL:: You should really look into Node.js.
TG:: I've heard of it, but what the heck is that?
EL:: It's basically server-side JavaScript.

There, I started on my journey learning JavaScript and Node.js.

Learning

So I just Googled something like “learnign node.js” (with spelling errors), and NodeSchool pops up. Nice yellow-themed website. And then there were some so-called “workshoppers” that are “self-guided … lesson modules”. I already knew JavaScript quite a bit, so I directly picked up on “learnyounode”.

After wrestling with npm and Ubuntu nodejs vs node mess for an hour, there it was, a fine workshop with atomic units that are, frankly, extremely beginner-friendly. Node.js beginner-friendly, not JS beginner-friendly.

So I thought, nope, this doesn’t work at all, and went back to NodeSchool for the “javascripting” workshopper. And I have to say, I really enjoyed learning JS while my teacher lectures in my math class.

After finishing the two workshoppers I just mentioned, I started doing the “expressworks” workshopper. And it was equally amazing.

After about three day, I thought I was proficient enough to at least port the FATE CGI over. And to be honest, I almost was, but not proficient enough to do all the caching stuff, optimization, etc..

tl;dr: To learning JavaScript, 3+ things should be enough: some NodeSchool workshoppers, proficient Googling skills, and a learning spirit.

FATE

Not much to say here, except when I tried to add some caching some race conditions occurred. So I used a rwlock. Yes, rwlock, in JavaScript. I don’t even have any experiences for mutexes in C (and that shows my level of C…) and I do now in JS.

I also chose to use EJS because:

it is what’s used in the first blog post regarding Express.js on Google
it’s fast

But nevertheless, my friend told me about Jade. So I looked that up. Wow, said me in the past thought, it’s so cool … and clean …

Until I ported my entire project over and benchmarked it. Without caching it was something like 7x slower than EJS and slower than the Perl CGI version. Even with caching it had only ⅔ of the performance of EJS. So, I reverted my 500-line change and cried for 10 minutes, and moved on.

Jade

Gaining maintainer status

Interestingly, I started sending PRs fixing broken links on the website of Jade, even when I am not using Jade. After my second very trivial PR to Jade, the wonderful @ForbesLindesay added me to the Jade maintainers team. I was genuinely surprised, as I had literally less than a week of real JS experiences, and now I am on the maintainer team of a module that is installed over 70,000 times per day.

All the easy stuff

Back to the story. I continued contributing to Jade in some documentation stuff and some trivial deprecation stuff. But gradually, I became more familiar with the code base, and more comfortable with working with JS, which frankly is a bastard language, but a bastardly (assuming that’s a word) easy- to-write language.

Harder stuff

One of my most recent commits to Jade was adding tests for caching and the CLI, including CLI watching mode where the output is recompiled whenever you modify the source file. The async nature of caching and process spawning were extremely challenging even now as I recall it. I am still fairly proud of myself for being able to figure out a way to do that.

Now and beyond

Now I am the person with the third most commits in Jade, plus I gained a whole lot more experiences with working with a mature Node.js project and @ForbesLindesay. Huge shoutout to everybody who helped me in the process!

I still haven’t gotten to study the Jade parser and lexer, the two beasts TJ wrote a long time ago and are starting to show some age. Forbes said he is going to split them to new repos in the Jade v2 rewrite, so for now let’s wait until a roadmap to v2 is established.

EJS

Discovery of EJS v2

A few weeks ago, when tracking dependencies of fateserver on David, I saw EJS 2.0.2 was just published. As any good project maintainer would do, I went to the tj/ejs GitHub repo, and saw a huge deprecation notice there, saying that EJS v2 is now maintained in mde/ejs. After tinkering around a little bit, I found out that mde/ejs was basically a reimplementation of TJ’s EJS, originally called “Geddy JavaScript Web development framework”. Interestingly, all (well, most, but now it’s all thanks to me ;) of the EJS v1 APIs were there, but were ported to v2 in the last minute. (Matthew is a really fast programmer).

Contributing

While trying to port my app over, I saw that quite a bit was missing from the new implementation. One of those was the _with option I depend upon for enhanced performance. So I opened a PR for that.

Similar to my experiences in Jade, as one of the first contributors to EJS v2, @mde quickly gave me the maintainer permission to EJS as well. And then I started fixing a lot of things in EJS v2, making it almost completely compatible to v1 (else than the filter stuff, which noone uses).

Performance issues

When benchmarking my app, I notice that the performance of it has significantly declined from EJS v1 (by ~70%). So I started optimizing it. In EJS v2.2.1, two changes of mine made the template functions almost 4x faster in some conditions. But still, it was slower than EJS v1 in more complex apps, both in compilation and compiled functions (though not as much as compilation).

Forking

At last I pinned the slower performance in compilation to the overuse of regexes and OOP in the new implementation, two issues to which there are no good fixes. Without a second choice, I forked tj/ejs’s repo and started backporting features in EJS v2 to that.

I have to say that my backport worked fairly well. For compilation it is 1.1x faster than EJS v1 and 3.52x than EJS v2. For template functions, it is almost 1.36x faster than EJS v2 in regular mode and 1.26x faster in !_with mode, albeit 32% slower than EJS v1 in extreme cases in regular mode.

So I was hoping I could merge my branch to EJS v2, but @mde said (in private):

I’m really not a fan of the dense, acrobatic code in TJ’s repo. If it’s hard for me to figure out, it would also make it hard for people in the community.

So no, we ain’t gonna merge it. Do note that what he said is 100% true. TJ’s code is, for a lack of a better word, godly, both godly fast and godly spaghetti. But for me, at least, @mde’s implementation basically splits one function in TJ’s implementation to something like 7 plus an enum, most of as simple as heck, but the 3 most important functions no less spaghetti IMO as TJ’s. True, TJ’s parse() is long, but that doesn’t mean it’s harder to read. Rather, it is easier for me because you don’t need to jump back and forth to look at the three functions doing some very procedural things.

As a result, I officially forked the package, to a very creative name ejs-tj. I will keep maintaining both forks though. For my fork, I intend to keep compatibility with EJS v2 forever (within my lifespan and mde/ejs’s), so I even decided to use the same version numbers as EJS v2’s.

Conclusion

Node.js is really a world of endless wonders, friendly developers, and unlimited job opportunities. I shall continue in my journey to the mastery of the JavaScript language and the environment of Node.js.

EDIT: ~~why did I put the last sentence here?~~ Removed

EEDIT: copyedits

Google Code-In 2014

Mon, 29 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Google Code-In 2014 started a few weeks ago. It is basically a competition open to all students in high school or lower, to contribute in open-source projects. There are twelve OSS institutions who got picked my Google this year, most of them were in last year’s GCI too:

Apertium
BRL-CAD
Copyleft Games
Drupal
FOSSASIA
Haiku
KDE
Mifos Initiative
OpenMRS
Sahana Foundation
Sugar Labs
Wikimedia Foundation

I myself started doing Google Code-In last year as a 9^th grader. To be honest, when I started GCI last year, I only knew two of the organizations. Yes, two: KDE and Wikimedia. They all seem to be fairly good-sized though, and have a large support network for newcomers.

The competition itself is organized into individual “tasks,” and the number of tasks completed determines the prizes you can get (see next section).

Competition Details

Table time.

# of tasks completed	Prize	Name
0	Nothing	Student
1	A certificate (~$2^***)	Participant
3	A T-shirt (~$14 ^***)	Ditto
x^*	A sweatshirt (~$35 ^***)	Finalist
y^**	A trip to Mountain View, CA	Grand Prize Winner

^*: a moderately large natural number, always greater than 3. Always equal to the number of tasks completed by the fifth most productive student of a project.

^**: a very large natural number, almost always greater than x. Always equal to the number of tasks completed by the second most productive student of a project.

^***: estimated by Google.

Last Year

Last year, I participated in the event as well, getting a certificate and a T-shirt:

Guess the number of tasks I did: 3. Just enough to get the shirt and brag about it (I didn’t actually brag about it to be honest).

How the heck can you do only 3 tasks????? You are Timothy!

Because I:

was sick,
had to do homework for the finals (I was in a different high school then), and
had a trip.

This Year

Beginning

This year, I;

don’t have a trip,
have finals during GCI, which is a good thing as I don’t study for finals unless someone forces me to, and there is no such person during the finals, and
am not sick.

So I registered very early, asked my mom to sign the permission slip, and got ready to actually do something this year. Last year, you have to wait until you are verified in order to do any task, but this year, Google improved their technique and says:

* Note: Your forms will be reviewed and verified after you complete your first task. Please do not wait to claim a task until your forms are verified, Program Administrators will not review a student’s forms until the student has completed their first task.

Thing is, I didn’t see this passage. So for about 2 weeks I was waiting for Google to verify my high school credentials. Finally a righteous soul on irc://irc.freenode.net/#gsoc told me that they changed the policies.

Major oops.

Tasks

As my first task, I just picked a random one regarding packaging, and it turned out to be from Haiku, a free operating system reimplementing the BeOS, a pretty, simple and fast OS (compared to Windows 2000/ME, that is). Because of my background in Debian packaging (I used to ran an Ubuntu PPA – until I stopped maintaining it) and my involvement in MXE, the task was pretty simple for me.

I spent an entire afternoon trying to set up the operating system correctly in VirtualBox. So here’s what I did, in a Timothy-style list:

Download latest release of Haiku
Set up a new VM
Boot
Do steps on the package managers’ website to set up a packaging toolchain
mkdir a missing dir
Adding the PATH to my .bashrc
Found out the packager doesn’t work on the alpha release
Download latest nightly build of Haiku
Same as #2
Same as #3
Same as #4
Kernel debugger appears, random error messages appear
Found out they were complaining about my disk being full
Try to adjust the VB disk size
Same as #3
Find Haiku doesn’t recognize the additional space (they weren’t formatted)
Repeat 14-16 for about 3 times
Give up
Found out an article WRITTEN SPECIFICALLY FOR THIS
Hit myself in the head
Do the steps in the article: a. Same as #8 –> #2 b. Add additional disk c. Format & mount additional disk d. Do stuff with cp
Ready-to-use OS (after ~6 hours)

Then I started actually doing the task.

After I finished this first one I saw there are some so-called beginner tasks that are designed to help beginners (me) set up their VMs.

Same as #20

</ol>

Looking Forward

Judging plainly from the Unofficial GCI Leaderboard, it is not likely that I would be able to be one of the top two – the grand prize winners. But I will try to keep myself in the first five of the Haiku project though. A sweatshirt is always better than a T-shirt, 对不? ;)

Website

Sun, 14 Dec 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Finally, I decided to make myself a website on GitHub Pages. After browsing through a repo full of themes, I decided to pick this one by @johnotander. I hope I’ll find some time to add more stuff to it, but for now, hope you like it!