Peter’s Personal Blog

writing software in New York City

Introducing Tags on Pickr.lol

I’m excited to be rolling out some brand new tagging capabilities on Pickr.lol. You can select as many of the tag pills you’d like, and the topics that are listed will be filtered based on the tags you’ve selected. Initial implementation of the Tagging feature The tags are ordered by the number of topics that the tag currrently has. Huge shout-out to the wonderful folks over at Ring the Belle who brought so much great traffic to the website by publishing a video on Youtube of Who’s The Greatest Divas Champion of All Time?...

February 2, 2023 · 2 min · Peter Ju

Basic Product Analytics

The beauty of having something (relatively) complete and available to the general public, is that it can get some legs of its own, and have some exciting moments. Pickr.lol has had two big moments in the last half a year, which led me to finally implement some basic Amplitude user tracking. One moment was 6 months ago, which was the post Dream SMP member Tournament. There was a post on reddit which got somewhat popular, and brought a lot of new users to the site....

October 12, 2022 · 4 min · Peter Ju

Mobile Canvas Download

For Pickr, which is a tournament playing app, I recently implemented a feature where after playing the game, the user would be shown an image of their play history. Here’s my playthrough of the Most Entertaining Spier-Man movie of all time: Spider-Man: Far From Home was the Spider-Man 2 of the Tom Holland era; characters were well established, the origin story told, and we were ready to have an awesome villain in Mysterio and a budding romance plot between Peter and MJ....

April 26, 2022 · 5 min · Peter Ju

Extreme Mobile First

With Pickr, one of the front end engineering philosophies I decided early on was to only design with an extreme mobile first mentality. Mobile first design refers to a design philosophy that aims to create better UX by starting the design process from the smallest of screens, which is mobile. Extreme mobile first refers to a design philosophy where every other design other than mobile is de-prioritized. I made this assumption since I imagine most people visiting Pickr will experience mobile, and mobile only....

July 7, 2021 · 2 min · Peter Ju

What to Record

Learning new things are a great pleasure of mine, but even more than that sometimes is the act of spreading this joy by teaching others. That’s something that really gets me motivated and fulfilled at the end of the day, it’s been the case since in my professional life explaining things to coworkers, the case when I was a TA back in university, or when I was tutoring kids English back in Korea....

June 18, 2021 · 1 min · Peter Ju

Biking With Classical Music

Biking “It’s just a massive challenge. We’re in business to sell bicycles… and we have no bicycles. Michael Cranwell, general manager at Gears Bike Shop Another way that Canada, and other parts of the world has changed since the outbreak of the Coronavirus disease, is the rise of recreational bikers. Biking, even pre-pandemic has always had a special place in my heart. It is simply the best way to explore and navigate a new area for pleasure, if the conditions are suitable....

June 14, 2021 · 3 min · Peter Ju

Gradual Reopen

Yet another strategy for restaurants to maximize patrons given the constraints during the panedemic, has been outdoor partios which have been converted from parking lots. Just yesterday, a partial reopen phase began in Ontario, including the reopening of outdoor patios. One interesting difference between this reopen and the previous ones is the fact that last calls have been set back to pre-pandemic times (2AM), as opposed to the brutally tight 9PM in the previous reopen....

June 13, 2021 · 4 min · Peter Ju

Introducing Pickr

What is Pickr? It is a tournament style game that can be played online. Players select a topic (or more commonly, may click on a link to find one) for the tournament to be based upon. When the game is opened, users are shown 2 random choices that are essentially contestants for the given topic. I pick the Pomeranian, as I'm biased towards breeds with longer fur The player continues to play until only the victor remains, in continuous rounds....

June 10, 2021 · 3 min · Peter Ju