Essays

Reflecting on AI in ICS 314: WODs, Club Oven Lovin’, and Beyond

15 Dec 2025

I. Introduction AI showed up everywhere in ICS 314 this semester—from Next.js WODs to the Club Oven Lovin’ final project. I leaned on ChatGPT-style agents to plan tasks, generate prompts for teammates, and sanity-check Prisma changes. Tools like GitHub Copilot...

Patterns in the Pantry: Rediscovering Our Club Oven Lovin’ Architecture After M2

03 Dec 2025

From Thanksgiving Layover to Design Pattern Do-Over Milestone 2 (M2) went by in a blur. I spent that stretch bouncing between Boston job interviews and Thanksgiving travel, which meant I wasn’t as present in the repo as I wanted to...

Reflect on Software Engineering: Shipping Club Oven Lovin

02 Dec 2025

Introduction Building Club Oven Lovin forced me to treat software engineering less like a class assignment and more like a public product. The project combined appetizing UI, strict data protections, and a delivery deadline, so every decision—from image uploads to...

Final Project Idea

04 Nov 2025

MānoaLingo: Capture, Enrich, and Review the Words You Meet Authors Koichiro Amakasu Miron Suarez Chloe Teijeiro Nathan Vogel Kevin Lee Overview The problem: Many UHM students meet new foreign-language words in classes, conversations, or media, but it’s hard to capture...

Software Engineering Nextjs

UI Frameworks Are a Second Language — Why I Chose Bootstrap 5 (and When I Wouldn’t)

10 Oct 2025

TL;DR UI frameworks are a second language. They come with vocabulary (classes), grammar (component APIs), and idioms (utility-first patterns). Learning Bootstrap 5 costs time and frustration, but the payoff is speed, accessibility, and a shared dialect that plain HTML/CSS rarely...

Linting My Brain: What Two WODs Taught Me About Coding Standards

25 Sep 2025

TL;DR I used to think “coding standards” meant bikeshedding about braces and spaces. After a week of ESLint + TypeScript and two WODs, I now think standards are the shortest path to writing correct code faster. The rules didn’t just...

Smart Questions in the Wild: a one-flag lesson from Boost.Program_options

11 Sep 2025

Why “smart questions” matter Good questions buy you time. They compress context for volunteers, make the problem falsifiable, and often lead you to the answer while writing them. Eric S. Raymond’s How To Ask Questions The Smart Way argues for...

When TypeScript clicked: typed thinking and timed WODs

11 Sep 2025

Why TypeScript clicked for me I came to TypeScript from everyday JavaScript and some Java/Python. What surprised me first was not the annotations, but how the compiler nudges me to think. With JS I often “just run it and see”;...