E-Liang’s Blog

E-Liang’s Blog

Software Engineering

🧠 Big Brain React: Preventing expensive remounts by... preventing unmounts

One minute (re)mounts So here was the situation: at work, we had a component that was incredibly expensive to mount – in some cases, mounting literally took a whole minute. This could have been tolerable if it happened rarely, e.g. perhaps when the page first loads, but unfortunately we

Software Engineering

UIKit's UIViews in JavaScript, Part 2: Design and Implementation

This is a second part of a 2-part series, in which I describe a new view framework I developed while working on an experimental React concurrent mode profiler. In part 1, I discussed why implementing a view abstraction was necessary. In this part, we'll discuss what this framework

Software Engineering Featured

UIKit's UIViews in JavaScript, Part 1: Why?

This summer, I have been working on an experimental React concurrent mode profiler as part of the inaugural batch of the MLH Fellowship. One of the biggest engineering challenges I had was to optimize our canvas rendering. This was no small task. A single 10-second profile can have over 100,

Computer Science

ELI5: Leader Election

In distributed systems, it is often necessary to elect a leader process whenever there is a need to coordinate tasks. We assume that such a system contains a symmetric network of processes, i.e. all processes in the network are indistinguishable, and anyone can be the leader. Note that these

Singular “they” – SJW newspeak or Shakespearean standard?

The grammatical theory behind both the conservative and innovative usage of this hotly debated word.

Software Engineering

Transferring data using barcodes

Outline of a novel way to transfer data between devices over an air gap using sets of PDF417 barcodes