About Me

My enthusiasm for coding is beyond words.

I started as an mechanical engineer but ended up as an a coding geek not because I failed in my major, if any I had kind of nailed it, but because the accomplishment gained from the coding was way larger than that in mechanics; bestowing the ability to move on a robot is more intriguing than building a robot from scratch. And that passion drove me into this field of programming then and forever.

Lecturing the LabVIEW course was when my coding version of Cambrian Explosion began. 
Although some programmers might not pay attention to graphical programming, as an amateur, LabVIEW really gave me a big picture of the concept of OOP and made everything interesting, not to mention I learned it so fast that National Instruments had even offered me a position to hold classes in my own college to teach a bunch of graduate students LabVIEW until I left the college.
The very first class I lectured 
Inspired by LabVIEW, I had then took the advanced class in C# to deep dive into OOP and design patterns. I finished the advanced class with a Chinese divine project blending decorator, strategy and factory design patterns that impressed my lecturer.

This small project demonstrated how I applied the decorator, the strategy and the factory design patterns to reproduce the original core of the I Ching, a traditional Chinese divine that tells one's fortune and what one should be aware of in the future.

I got those skills implemented when I participated in the TDK national robot competition as well as a website project as I worked part-time for a professor. Out of my own interests, I took a image processing class teaching OpenCV(Open Source Computer Vision Library) at the last year of my college. 

The robot was designed to finish a series of specific tasks

But my programming career did not stop there. The Domino Effect just kept working.

I got a job as a software engineer in an Optics Company before graduation. 
On the last day of  my work, my coworkers thew a farewell party for me. Even my supervisor was there. We had a great time. 
I was in the department of 3D printing and was in charge of the examination and calibration for the projected image. I had a heavenly experience there in that their laissez-faire policy allowed me to study further and to develop my own stand-alone application using C# within a fair amount of time. I started to come up with some neat programming structure with sufficient expandability, managed to work with multi-threaded application, and had time learning algorithms online.

Building monotonous applications is boring, however. 
I always like to add some fun elements to them. For example, I introduced the TTS(text to speech) module so that the computer could "speak" whenever the task was done or failed. This function actually worked because it kept operators from idling. To my surprise, it came with an funny anecdote: there was a short period of time when the night-shift operators dreaded to enter the process line because they kept hearing someone's talking but seeing no one. I'm not saying that I like to scare somebody out of the blue but I do like to try some fresh, interactive functions that breathe live into my program. Perhaps that's one way how I keep coding from getting boring.

On top of that, I learned how to cooperate with people in different fields of studies. 
I first thought coding was more of a solitary work but it turned out working with others made me feel more energetic and motivated. It's always good to hear the feedback from others and their appreciations as well. To be honest, not until I got the feedback from others did I realize that doing projects on my own can easily fall victim to self-contentment and sometimes impractical. I loved the way my coworkers mocked at my bugs in the program. They always laughed out loud in the process line saying that "Even your program don't want you to leave." -- they all knew that I would one day fly across the pacific ocean for a bigger dream.

I've learned a lot from myself. With all these coding skills and open sources at hand, however, I still found myself shortage of mathematical tools and some analytics strategies when I was dealing with certain image processing problem. At the meanwhile, I grouped with my friends to participate in a machine learning competition held by MatLab. That was the time when I was jolted out of complacency by the power of machine learning. Without a solid statistic background and the state-of-the-art techniques, I can go only so far. That was why I decided to step out of my comfort zone and came all the way from Taiwan to study Analytics.
My coworkers are fun in away that that can ease the tense situation but take the detail seriously, and so do I. Birds of a feather flock together, I guess. I've already flapped my wings in Taiwan, let's wait and see if it can cause a dramatic change here in America.

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