- work
Starting to work at Clio as a web-developer (yes I am, starting this month), I would like to focus on next couple of years to building strong web-development skills, particularly on Ruby on Rails framework, which Clio is running on. I want to say in next few years, "I am good at this"; and now Ruby on Rails is in my target. Having done school at SFU, career development is a good focus at this time and I am happy to start at Clio and develop software engineering experience.
- self-learnig
Having done undergrad-education is no-mean to finish my study and go party. This is just a starting point and it is a fundamental I just built so that I can start building stuff and apply things. I am deciding what my focus of areas of study in next few years. Keywords are: parallel programming, distributed computing (applications like Hadoop), virtual machine, functional programming, etc. These are just things that come up lately and my interests of study will change. But I think it is good to choose focus and spend a fair amount of time rather than just touching many and feel good.
Another way of study is taking online education. Stanford CS has recently opened several courses for the public and can even get a letter of completion. I am very excited about this opportunity and enrolled its AI Class. If you know any good free-online courses on parallel programming and distributed system, please let me know. Taking free-online educations like MIT's OpenCourseWare and that Standford's experimental program, I believe I can build more fundamentals and stay up-to-date.
Area of Interests
- Dots between public sectors, communities, and civic developers
I am a big fun of Code For America, Civic Commons, and OpenPlans. They are cool, and I believe they are addressing a right question. My interests in Gov2.0 and OpenData continues to grow and will keep watching closely. My recent move in this area (sort of) is the involvement in ChangeCamp. I have joined the planning committee for Vancouver ChangeCamp 2011 and I am hoping to get connections with people who have similar interests, know how to organize event/bootcamp/unconference, and most importantly I want to see what's out there.
I would like get involved in a wide range of events and widen my interests, fulfilling my curiosity. Attending events like DesignThinking open new perspectives and always give me inspirations. Diversity and Vancouver are good together and I want to take advantage of this.
I also want to get involved in opensource communities. My target is becoming Code For America's git committers.
Recently Mr. Joi Ito has made an interesting post (in Japanese, and this) regarding emergent democracy. Reading this, it made me think of another great post: The Technium: Why the Impossible Happens More Often
I've used the example of the bee before. One could exhaustively study a honey bee for centuries and never see in the lone individual any of the behavior of a bee hive. it is just not there, and can not emerge until there are a mass of bees. A single bee lives 6 weeks, so a memory of several years is impossible, but that's how long a hive of individual bees can remember. Humanity is migrating towards its hive mind. Most of what "everybody knows" about us is based on the human individual. Collectively, connected humans will be capable of things we cannot imagine right now. These future phenomenon will rightly seem impossible. What's coming is so unimaginable that the impossibility of wikipedia will recede into outright obviousness.
Connected, in real time, in multiple dimensions, at an increasingly global scale, in matters large and small, with our permission, we will operate at a new level, and we won't cease surprising ourselves with impossible achievements.
My prediction is that in the coming years our biggest surprises -- the ones that aren't predicted -- will be the result some new method of large scale social interactions. While we will get good at predicting the next advance of technological innovation, we won't get very good at predicting what happens with the hive mind. And exploring the hive mind -- the thousands of ways in which we can connect and reconnect ourselves -- will be the chief activity of our civilization in the near term. If I am right then we'll have to get better at believing in the impossible.
Design can be re-designed and improved, so is democracy. I believe there is a huge potential in this area and will benefit greatly from the recent technological advancement in social networking and possibilities in large scale social interactions. If you know any good place to start exploring this, please let me know.
I am pretty excited about my post-SFU life in Vancouver.
The world is big, there is so much to learn and too much cool stuff. Don't waste your time, go out and do stuff!
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