Linsanity

This article has nothing to do with web technology. It is only a summary of what I read in a latest article about Jeremy Lin from Forbes. The original article is here

Jeremy Lin is an Asian-American, whose parents came from Taiwan. He was born in California and being educated in the USA all his life. His latest performance in NBA arouses a huge attention recently. Watching those video clips, I could not believe my eyes at all. It has been rooted in my heart that Asians is no way compatible with African-American or other America basketball players because of physical conditions. He is really an outlier but he is still shorter compared to other basketball players. To express my admiration for his outstanding basketball skills, and to remind me some of the most important things when odds are not in our side, I take notes from this Forbes article. Though success can not be replicated, but his story still can give us some hints about success.

1. "You've got to believe in yourself, even when no one else does"
2. "You never know when opportunities are going to arise in life. Often, they're when you least expect them"
3. "Before that (got his contract guaranteed by the Knicks), he could have been cut at any time"
4. "You've got to do your best to understand what your strengths are and then ensure that you're in a system( a job or organization or industry) that is a good fit for those strengths"
5. "We put people around us in boxes.....Do you know what your people (or even yourself) is really capable of?"
6. "...you find what your're good at and do it". "Always be a first-rate version of yourself. Instead of a second-rate version of somebody else"
7. "Stay humble"
8. "When you make others around you look good, they will love you forever. ...They (the Knicks players) are all working harder to share the ball with others. And it's beautiful to watch".
9. "Never forget about the importance of luck or fate in life."
10 ."There are not short cuts to hard work. Success is a by product of that. ....You can only control what you control".

All these words are extracted from the article "Just Lin, Baby! 10 Lessons Jeremy Lin can teach us......."

work recently

Recently I have been working on a customized production / inventory management system, utilizing techniques such as PHP, MySQL and JavaScript. By working on this project, accumulates my knowledge and skills in web development. There is nothing fancy here. Since this is an internal website, users are employees inside the company, which provide me a good chance to work closely with them and get immediate feedback. Most of the time, users come with their need and their thoughts about the platform. I am very glad to see that, a very small change to the page can greatly improve their work efficiency. It is also not uncommon that we need to fix bugs reported, to add a supervisor's sign off before processing further,... etc maintenance work.

For example, users are asking a features on a daily-use list to add on a check box for each item they are working on, which flags the item as problematic or not. This simple job facilitates the work around the co-workers in that team and supervisors can review the list to take the next step. We utilize an ajax request and make changes to the HTML DOM element using javascript, to give users an immediate response upon users checking the box.

Or we create a dashboard for information sharing among different teams. For example, different teams need to take actions after the ball entering into their court. Earlier, they are using emails to communicate the current status, which is less efficient and a waste of man power. We keep track of the status every time a critical action is taken and update the status on the dashboard and sending out system notifications to related teams.

These plain tasks streamline the process, cut off unnecessary work and increase people's performance.