‘Design & Code’ is a series about design and engineering experiments, processes, and learnings, brought to you by the AirSwap team.

This past summer, during my internship at MongoDB, I worked with my partner, Margaret Stephenson, and developed a prototype Javascript engine that significantly improved performance of the $where operator in MongoDB. We also applied certain heuristical optimizations to allow $where to utilize Collection indexes where possible.

I’m nearing the critical period to cram for my Algorithms final tomorrow at 8 AM. But in honor of my impeccable study habits, here’s a quick write up about (my approach with) auto-loading Backbone views with RequireJS.

Recently, a lot of people have been asking me about New York. Sometimes, it’s regarding this whole “hackingNY” thing that I was a part of this past summer. And other times, it’s about my fascination with Manhattan and the greater NY area. But most of the time, the questions are just about how I manage to keep missing my flights out of Newark. But first, an anecdote.

Recently, I’ve been considering taking a year off of school to work for Codecademy in New York. I first got in contact with Yoonie, the recruiter, near the end of my freshman year at UCLA. After two phone interviews, I reluctantly told her that, unfortunately, spending a year in New York was not something my parents approved of.

Rewind back a year. After being cut from the UCLA drumline in the fall, I was looking forward to 2013. The dawn of winter signified a new beginning for me, a chance for me to redeem myself in the heat: drum-corps season. I had spent countless hours preparing myself for auditions; I was ready to prove that I was good enough. I tried out for the Pacific Crest drumline and after two days of auditions, I was given a callback. I would audition again in February.

January came and went, and in February, I was cut.

I recently migrated my blog from Wordpress to Ghost, but I wanted to maintain my old blog posts on Wordpress (check this out for more background information). As such, I needed to configure my server to run the two different web platforms through a similar route-subdirectory. Here’s how I did it:

A week ago, I was lucky enough to have graduated from the inaugural Chrome Academy Class of 2013. Chrome Academy is a new program by Google that offers college underclassmen the opportunity to spend a week at the Mountain View campus and learn about new web technology. It was an experience unlike any other: a challenge in itself, but perhaps even more challenging to describe in words. In any case, I’ll try my best to detail one of my most life-changing experiences so far.