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I arrived in San Francisco last night with Jenny and a friend of ours at around 10:30 local time to attend Jenny’s friend’s wedding which takes place later today.  I was so extremely dead tired last night and was thinking that I’d be able to sleep in until around 7:30 am, but no, I woke up at around 5:15 and instead of fighting myself to fall back asleep, I thought I’d get up, iron my dressy clothes I brought w/ me, check into a Starbucks located across the street from the hotel, and create some free time for myself.

Free time has been nearly impossibly hard to come by as of late.  Yes, the upcoming wedding has a lot to do with it, but there have been a few other reasons for my busyness as well.

1) Job transitions: After switching to a new job back in July, I decided to come back to my old job and have been back for a week and a half now.  I left the new job because of 1) some very crucial “miscommunications” (I’ll leave it at that) that occurred which resulted in a fair amount of anger on my part and 2) being a consultant wasn’t quite the panaceatic experience I hoped it would be.  Had it not been for reason #1, I would not have left that job (or, at least now now) but you know, stuff happens in life and well, I really could not get myself to stick around at that company.  So this happens to have been the first time in my life I decided to leave a job because I was upset and well, I can only hope it doesn’t happen again because it wasn’t much fun going through the experience and in some ways, I feel like I wasted 12 and a half weeks of my career.  Having said that, I am happy to be back at the old job and in many ways, it feels like I never left the job in the first place.  It’s a really good thing I didn’t burn any bridges with people at work when I left my job back in July.

2) Family transitions: I’ve been busy assisting my parents with moving out to their new home.  Their original plan was to move back to Korea later this year but well, it didn’t work out like they had hoped so they’ll be staying put for at least another year.  With my dad turning 60 next year and my mom well into her mid 50′s, I cannot imagine even the possibility of having to pick up everything and move back to the country they had left behind 20 years ago.  I still cannot fully (actually, it’s nowhere near “fully”) comprehend how, back in 1991, they could have packed up their bags and move to a completely foreign part of the world for the sake of their children.  Hopefully in a few years, I’ll get to understand the love my parents have/had for their children.  I love my parents and always wish I can do something a little more to help them out.

And speaking of family transitions, my brother is in the process of moving out as well.  He recently started to sell Comcast to make a living and to my pleasant surprise, he’s been an amazing salesperson.  And in addition, he’s been instructing chess at various schools and even promoting a nightclub to make a few bucks.  I can’t help but to be proud of my brother for taking initiatives such as these in his life and it’s been a joy to see the growth that’s been taking place in his life as of late.

3) Wedding planning: Well, I just had to include it in this list.  42 days to go and quickly counting down.  There have been moments when I’ve been very stressed and find myself more or less in the “I-just-wanna-get-over-with-the-wedding” mindset.  There is A LOT to do, just plain and simple.  What keeps me motivated at the end of the day, though, is that when all of this planning is over with I’ll get to marry someone who is just incredibly beautiful and is the person God chose to graciously bless me with.

Okay, I’m gonna go enjoy the few hours of free time I have left before Jenny and our friend wakes up from their slumber.

I’ve been meaning to write this post last weekend but oh well, better late than never, right?  Last Saturday I attended ChicagoWebConf which was organized by DevMynd.  It was good.  I learned some rather useful things and all in all, I’m very glad I made it out.  Here’s a list of tracks I took:

-Quality Development with HTML5 and CSS3 (Shay Howe)

-Real Typography for the Web (David Demaree)

-Web Accessibility (Mark Meeker)

-The Right Way to Wireframe (Russ Unger)

-The Visualization Renaissance (or more appropriately titled Using SVG w/ Raphael.js) (Sam Tesla)

-User Experience Thought Process (Ryan Singer)

Of these, my favorites were Real Typography for the Web and User Experience Thought Process.  Both came with excellent presenters and they presented on exactly the kind of thing that I was expecting to hear from those guys.

David Demaree did such a good job of explaining why typography is so important to a web application (or, any application/website/product for that matter) and how correct typographical usage can drastically improve the usability of the application.  It’s so much more than things simply “looking pretty”.  Good typography serves very useful & tangible purposes.

Ryan Singer did an excellent job of walking the audience through his thought process when he’s working on a UI design.  I loved it because it was extremely practical and he did a great job of actually demoing the very thing he was talking about.  He took a sample web app that had various usability flaws and by the end of his talk, he had created a prototype of this web app with some very significant usability improvements.

For $75 (early bird fee was $50.  Wish I could’ve jumped on that) I really could not ask for any more.  I can’t believe the whole thing only cost attendees $75 or $50!  AND they gave us breakfast and lunch.  It makes me wonder why software conferences & training often cost SO freakin’ ridiculously much.

Great job in putting this together, DevMynd!

One of the main purposes for keeping this blog is for me to think through and reflect upon things and to remind myself of the lessons that I’m learning.  I keep myself pretty busy (there never seems to be enough hours in a day) and from time to time (more often than I would like) I will go through an entire day without having reflected upon what I’m doing and how I can improve upon my work.

So I thought I would press pause for a bit and give myself some reminders on writing good software.

1. Write first, refactor later.  While I was in school I really disliked writing papers, not necessarily because I didn’t enjoy writing papers, but more so, because it usually took me extremely long to write an essay, even a simple 3 to 4-page essays.  And one of the reasons why it took me so long to write papers was because I often thought and long and hard about each word I was putting down on paper as I was typing out the words.  I tried to write “the perfect paper” as I was typing crunching out the paper, and well, that usually turned out to be a not-so-good idea.

Same thing with writing songs.  It usually takes me an excruciatingly long  time to write a song because I try to write the perfect lyrics as I’m writing them down.  Again, bad idea.  The better idea, as I’ve learned from other songwriters, is to write down the words as they’re streaming out from my brain.  Almost in an unconscious fashion.  And once a draft has been composed, go back to the lyrics and do a rewrite.  And another rewrite.  And another and so forth.

When I’m writing code, I find myself having to remind myself that it’s perfectly O.K. to not write the perfect, most optimal, most readable code on the first try.  It usually saves me a ton of time to type out what simply works and then go back and perform refactoring.  Write tests to make sure that as I’m refactoring, I’m not breaking my own code.

2. Details, details, details.  It’s easy to write code that works 95% of the time.  It’s so much harder to write code that works 100% of the time.  Pay attention to the details.  Over the last few years in my career, I’ve been writing more & more front-end code and it’s often really easy to gloss over all of the different ways in which end users will interact with the application.  Don’t just assume that users will interact with the application in ways that I would.  As I’m writing code, I need to always try to break my own code.  It’s interesting to me just how much easier it is for me to break someone else’s code rather than my own.  If someone else wrote the exact same code that I wrote and I was asked to test both my code and this other person’s code, I can guarantee that I will find a ton more bugs with this other person’s code.

3. Code slower. I get a rush from getting things done.  It applies to pretty much everything in my life.  Oh how I love crossing things off from my various TODO lists.  It’s the same thing with writing code.  As a paid employee, I’m basically paid to produce as much as possible, as quickly as possible, in the highest quality possible.  As such, I find that there are times when I will write code only to later realize that I probably would’ve been just fine to code a bit slower and give myself more time to more deeply think about the code I’m writing.  And perhaps this conflicts with my point #1 above.  Or perhaps it doesn’t.  The point is, I must not forget that I’m not paid to create software that simply works in the time allotted but rather, to create software that does its job as well as it can possibly do.

I made it through my first week at the new job and well, I’m looking forward to going back to work on Monday.  That most certainly is a good sign.  Here are some of my thoughts & observations after Week #1:

• Good teammates: After 5 days, I’ve now had the chance to pair up with several different people on the team and I like them.  They’re smart, excellent at communicating ideas in such a way that a newcomer like myself can easily comprehend, and seem to be easy-going folks that I can work with effectively.  One thing (out of many) I’ve learned after having been a part of various software development  teams over the years is that co-workers have tremendous impact on one’s job satisfaction & job performance.

• Good project:  I started diving into a project pretty much as soon as I was done with the orientation session on day 1 and I really like the project.  It’s the kind of thing that I want to be working on and at the same time, there’s a LOT for me to learn and new concepts to grasp.  I think the best kind of projects are ones where the work itself is interesting, adds significant business value, I can make use of my expertise, and one in which I can learn new things.  This project has ‘em all.

• Long tables: This is the first job I’ve had where I don’t have my own desk.  I had my own desk when I was just a lowly paid intern at a software shop as a 16 year old.  Most of the people at my office come into work and grab an open spot among various long tables that are in the office.  First come, first serve.  It took me a couple of days getting used to this, but I think I’m liking it.  This kind of an office setup is more conducive to collaborative team environment, IMO.  I do miss my desk fan, though.

• Free snacks: Yup, free snacks, various kinds of drinks, and coffee are available at the office & I love it.  If (and hopefully when) I go out on my own and have people working for me in the future, I will most definitely make this available to my own employees.

• Power walks:  My office is about 1.2 – 1.3 miles away from the train station, which has resulted in 15 – 20 minute power-walking sessions at least once each day this past week (I’ve taken the bus back to the station a few times).  I think it’ll help me attain my dream of developing a 6-pack.  (trying to look at the brighter side of things…)

• Amazing view of the city: The office is on the 53rd floor and I have an amazing view of the city and Lake Michigan.  I’m gonna need to post some pictures of my view one of these days.

Well, I guess all good things must come to an end and make path for even better things to come.  My last day with my current employer will be tomorrow and I’ll be starting my life as a software consultant starting next Monday working for these guys.  While I’ve really enjoyed working here and I’m sad to be leaving this place, I have no doubts in my mind that I’m making the right move and I am filled with excitement and much anticipation.  I got to do a lot of end-to-end development, got involved in a number of important design decisions, wrote a lot of user interface-minded code (which I have definitely come to love), and last but not least, I had a lot of FUN writing code.

This will be my very first time working for a consulting firm and well, that’s something that I’ve been itching to do for some time now.  I’m just really thankful for the opportunity.

Anyhow, looking forward to Monday!

My office moved from Westmont to Chicago about 2 and a half months ago and ever since then I’ve been taking the Metra train to get to work.  There are some things I like about it and some things I don’t like much.

Things I Like:

-Energy: I really like the energy of the city.  Everything about the old office (the building itself, its surrounding area, etc.) was just very quiet and near-lifeless.  When you work in a suburb like Westmont, IL, you barely see anybody walking the streets.  Whenever you spot someone walking outside, chances are that the person is getting to/from his/her car.  Not so in the city.  There are people on the train.  There are people out on the streets.  People are chatting outside.  There are people everywhere.  There is life.

-People & Networking: I really like that there are a lot of people I can meet up with & network with right nearby where I work.  I like that user group meetings often take place in the city.

-Walking: I’m sure I won’t be thinking this way when there’s a foot of snow on the ground and it’s negative 10 outside but I have been enjoying the fact that I get to walk a little bit every day.  My walk from the train station to the office is quite short–about 5 minutes each way, which I find to be the perfect amount.

-Being in the city: It’s just plain nice to be in the city.  Chicago really is beautiful.  It sure beats being stuck in a suburb.  I live in an extremely suburban place and it’s very refreshing to get out of it for awhile each day Monday through Friday.

Things I Don’t Like:

-Cost: It’s expensive to commute to the city.  My train station is about 8 miles from my place, which costs me gas money as well as normal wear & tear on my car.  And then once I get to the station, I have to pay for parking.  And then of course, I have to pay for the Metra monthly train ticket which costs me $116.10.  That’s a lot of money just to get to and from work.

-Time: It used to take me 25 minutes to get to work.  Now, I have to drive for 15 minutes to get to my station, park, and then walk 3 minutes to get onto the platform.  And of course, I can’t just simply walk into my train right away; I get there about 5 minutes before the train just to be on the safe side.  Then there’s the 32 minute train ride.  Then when the train arrives at the Union station, I have to wait in line to get out of the train and then out of the station, and it takes me about 3 minutes to just get out of the station.  And then finally, there is the 5 minute walk to my office.  25 + 15 + 3 + 5 + 32 + 3 + 5 = 88 minutes.  I really do not like this at all.  Sure, I can get some useful things done on the train but it is a little challenging.  The train is often noisy & jerky and doesn’t help my concentration.

-Weather: Commuting to work has been a horrible experience when it’s raining a lot outside.  No need to explain that.  One time I forgot my umbrella and I paid a hefty price for my simple mistake.  I’m sure it will be worse when winter comes.  No need to explain that either.

-Lack of flexibility: I have to live and die by the Metra train schedule.  And if I want to go up to the northern suburbs after work (to go see my fiancée, for instance) I have to first take the train all the way down to the western suburbs and then and then take my car back up north.  That’s a lot of wasted time right there.

Driving to work in the suburbs Vs. Taking the train to the city: Which do I like better?  As of now, I can live with both and don’t have any strong preferences for one over the other.  I’m just hoping that this winter won’t be too bad of a winter.

While reading my Bible this morning before work I came across the following question:

“A difficult situation for Joseph (being sold into slavery) had a surprisingly positive outcome.  Have you ever had that happen in your life?”

While trying to come up with an answer to this question, I could not help but to think back to June of 1995, when less than a month after my family purchased our first home here in the States and moved into it, my parents’ jewelry store that they had been operating in Chicago’s south side got robbed.  At gunpoint.

My mom had flown out to Korea for a visit about a week or two before the robbery took place and so on the night the robbery occurred, it was getting late and my dad was going through his usual procedures to close the store for the day.  ”J & J Jewelry”–named after my brother & my first name initials–this was to be the very last day that the store would operate.

My dad explained to me that a large number of guys came into the store, were pretending to look around and then one of them (or perhaps more than just one of them, I don’t know) pulled out the his gun, threatened my dad, and well, they took pretty much all of the valuable merchandise and ran away.  One thing about gold is that it’s small.  And light.  And expensive.  And oh-so-very easy to steal in large quantities.

On the night the robber occurred, my dad came home and he told me he told me that he needed to talk to me.  I still vividly remember talking to my dad outside on the deck of our newly purchased home.  I had never seen a man so down and discouraged.  I was 14 at the time.  I was a little kid.  And yet my dad told me what had occurred earlier that night.

When I look back at my life there are 2 events in my life that I believe changed the course of my life (note: I don’t consider coming to know Christ and “receiving Christ into my life” an “event” that occurred in my life.  It was so much more of a process than an event.):  One is when my family immigrated from Korea to Chicago on the 16th of August, 1991.  The second is the robbery of my parents’ jewelry store.

After the robbery occurred, my parents were devastated, in various ways.  They were devastated financially due to the loss of their merchandise.  They were devastated because they had just purchased their home in Naperville.  How were they going to pay for the mortgage on this new home?  They were devastated emotionally and psychologically.  They had worked hard to get to where they were with the store.  They had made a ton of sacrifices.  And now, it was all but gone.

So, coming back to the question I came across this morning–did this tragic robbery produce a surprisingly positive outcome?

Well, while I’m not sure I would say that the robbery produced a “surprisingly positive outcome” I can say that I learned and grew so much because of it.  I witnessed in my parents the working out of their sheer will to survive and provide for their children.  A few months after the robbery, they took over a shoe repair store.  A shoe repair store.  This right here: the best shoe repair store in the world.  I’m not sure if people know this but let me tell you something:  Repairing shoes is hard work.  It’s dirty, dusty, you get no respect, and you can’t really make that much money doing it.  No one ever dreams of growing up to operate their own shoe repair shop.  My parents knew all that and they still decided to take over the shop because well, they needed to make ends meet and provide for their 2 children.  And you know what?  After all of these years (from 1995…) my parents are still struggling financially because of the actions of some heartless, immoral, gun-bearing thugs.  And even though they’re still struggling, they’re still going strong.  As I’m preparing for my marriage coming up in December and as I think more & more about having a family of my own, I can’t wait to provide for my children and to put into practice the lessons I learned & experienced watching my parents provide for me and my brother.

Another lesson I learned from observing my parents struggle through the outcome of this tragedy is perseverance.  I know my parents thought about giving up many times.  They had their share of days when they were 99% convinced that they just would not make ends meet operating their shoe repair store.  And yet here we are in 2011 and their shoe repair store is still going strong and the business is doing well (relatively speaking).  I don’t know how they’ve been surviving until now, but they have and I’m so proud of them for it.

Okay, it’s 7:12 AM and I need to leave the house soon to go pick up my fiancée and so we can commute to our offices.  It looks like I’ll be thinking of my parents on the train this morning.

www.jennyandjunho.com is now live!

Here are a few thoughts after finishing off the first major iteration of the website:

1) Visual design takes a long time. The site design is extremely simple.  And yet it took me hours upon hours to come up with the design–everything from colors, to borders, spacings, to font selections–each aspect of the visual design took such a long time to decide and I always seem to underestimate how long this process takes with every project I’ve taken on.

2) Content creation/gathering takes a long time as well. Again, another aspect of web projects I always seem to underestimate.

3) I hate all versions of Internet Explorer. I seriously wish that all versions of Internet Explorer never existed.  Why is it that almost always, things that work just fine in Chrome & Firefox simply do not work (or looked completely messed up) in IE?  However, it’s quite rare that something that works in IE is broken in Chrome & Firefox.  IE6 is most definitely the worst, IE7 is almost as bad, IE8 is not very good and as for IE9–while the jury is still out, it appears that it is most certainly NOT nearly good enough for me to make the switch from Chrome/Firefox to IE as being my primary browser.

Here’s some further information regarding the website:

• OS: Ubuntu 10.10 (actually, *just* upgraded to 11.04 a few days ago and it’s been working well so far)
• Eclipse for coding
• FileZilla for file transfers
• GIMP for image editing
• Google Web Fonts
• Hosting by Lithium Hosting
• Domain name was purchased via NetFirms.
• Tested on Chrome, Firefox, and IE.

This past Wednesday, I paid a visit to my alma mater (UIC) to be among the panelists to share my post-college experiences of working in the corporate world.  It was part of an “All Campus Worship” event that was being hosted by a number of student Christian organizations on campus and since I was heavily involved with Asian American InterVarsity all throughout my undergrad years and as such, there was absolutely no way I could not accept invitation to take part in this event.  My fiancée also took part in this event as a fellow panelist which was pretty neat.

Well, I am really glad I took part in this.  The panel discussion was inside of a small room with about 8 students and 4 panelists and all of the students were studying something either in the business or engineering field.  Very small, very intimate, and in the short 45 minutes that we had, I, along with the other panelists, were able to talk about a lot with these students who were eager to learn from our experiences.

As the panel discussion was taking place, I could not help but to reflect on my own 7 years of being out of school and working in corporate America.  Well, these are/were my thoughts, some of which I shared with the students and some of which I did not choose to share.  These are in no particular order, by the way.

1. It’s so very important to carefully pick your career choice.  You don’t have to get it 100% right the first time and yes, it’s true that people make drastic career changes all the time and many people are very successful in doing so.  With that said, however, don’t just flippantly pick your career choice without doing some serious thinking about it.  Do you like the field you want to go into?  Are you good at it (or at the very least, possess some relevant talents and skills)?  Can you picture yourself enjoying your work?  Money is important (more on that later), but don’t let it be your primary motivation.  Some people say that money will follow when you put your heart into your passion, even if it means you go into a field where good money is hard to come by (i.e. creative arts)–which I don’t completely agree with.  The truth is, there are career fields where it’s very easy to make a lot of money and there are career fields where making good money is extremely hard.  Regardless, choose a career field that will actually fulfill you.  Thankfully I’ve never had to experience this first hand, but I’ve heard and read over & over again your life becomes something very sad when you spent 40, 50, 60, 70 hours per week doing something you do not enjoy doing.
2. As a Christian, I (you – if you are a Christian) am called to be a Christian in the workplace as well.  And from having been in the working world since the age of 16, it is quite difficult to be an effective Christian in the workplace.  There have been countless number of times when I became uneasy sharing anything that has to do with my spiritual life with my coworkers.  Many, many people in the world (including those in corporate America) have extremely unfavorable opinions concerning Christians/Church/religion and many people (again, including those in corporate America) will have absolutely no problem voicing their distaste/distrust/disgust with their perception of Christianity.  There have been so many times when I’ve felt uncomfortable dipping my head for 10 seconds to pray for my meal during lunch with coworkers.  There have been so many times when I’ve felt uneasy sharing my church-filled weekend plans with my coworkers.  There have been times when I’ve gotten nervous sharing details of my relationship with Christ with my coworkers.  They still happen and they probably will for a long time to come.  The desire to fit in with the crowd doesn’t simply fade away after your adolescent years–I still have that desire.  But I have to fight against it.  Actually, I am (you are – if you are a Christian) called by Jesus to fight against that desire and boldly proclaim Christ.
3. Money is important and developing good money habits when you’re in college is crucial.  This is something I wish I knew when I was in college.  I wish people around me told me I should start saving aggressively even when I’m in college.  I wish people told me I would never run out of things to spend my money on–car, house, utilities, church, charitable organizations, missions, dining out, groceries, engagement ring, wedding, retirement, and the list goes on and on and on.  Actually, people around me probably did tell me all this stuff but I just never paid attention.  Thankfully, I’ve learned some really good money habits in these last few years, but again, at least when it comes to money, it’s better to earn your lessons earlier than later.  Having poor money habits will cost you–not only financially but it will affect your relationships (the #1 cause of divorce is money, I believe), your health (I just read last night in a book that your FICO score can impact your insurance premiums), your spiritual life (when you have no money and are in ridiculous amounts of debt, you’ll have no money to give to church/missions/those in need and this will most likely affect your relationship with Jesus), and your career (prospective employers have a habit of checking up on your credit).  Jesus talked about money A WHOLE LOT over the course of his ministry.  On a sort-of-a-tangential-yet-somewhat-related side note, did you know that The Parable of the Talents in Matthew 25 now shows up as The Parable of the Bags of Gold in the latest edition of the NIV Bible?
4. It’s important to set yourself apart from the rest of your peers in college.  It is only getting more and more difficult to find jobs and the level of competition has nowhere to go but up.  The stock market was in a cheery mood yesterday because the U.S. Unemployment Rate fell to 8.8 %, the lowest since March of 2009.  And while it’s true that the unemployment rate has been falling and many think that the unemployment rate will fall to somewhere around 6% in a few years, I still think that it’ll only get harder to make a living for those of us who are living in the States.  The talent pool seems to be exploding across various places in the world and they are competing for jobs even here in the US.  And while the talent pool as well as the quality of education is improving in various parts of the world, it appears that here in the US, it’s only getting harder to get quality education.  With all the government spending cuts that are/will be taking place, cost of education will only go up, and I think that the cost of college education here in the States is absolutely r-i-d-i-c-u-l-o-u-s.  And it seems pretty logical to me that less education will lead to less talent, which will lead to difficult times finding jobs.  Anyhow, going back to my point, set yourself apart.  Take internships, read books that relate to your career field of choice, develop your skillset on your own and don’t simply rely on your coursework to get you to where you want to be.

Phew, that was a lot.  That’s about all I have to share for now.

On Saturday, I got engaged to the most amazing girl I know.  It still hasn’t quite hit me yet.  To be honest, I’m guessing it’ll hit me once I get used to the daylight savings time and get some much needed rest after one unforgettable weekend.

Here’s a wedding website that I started working on:

JENNY & JUNHO – Our Wedding Website

As you can see, the website is pretty naked at the moment.  Don’t worry, it’ll get updated soon.  The website contains a link to the blog as well (which contains some pictures from Saturday)… which I’m really hoping that Jenny (my fiancée) and I will be able to update on a regular basis.

BTW, did you know that there’s a Korean movie titled “Jenny, Juno”?

Okay, I need to sleep… NOW.