You win some, you dim sum

Welcome

Hello and welcome to our blog. First a little bit about ourselves. My name is Aldrin. I am a newly graduated Computer Engineering major from the University of Waterloo. I am currently working as an iOS engineer at Coffee Meets Bagel, an online dating app. My coworker likes to call us ‘love engineers’. I grew up in Toronto, Canada, and now live in the San Francisco Bay Area. I started traveling a lot during my second year of university, and travelled abroad to many places, especially in South East Asia. My hobbies include volleyball, basketball, weightlifting, photography and sneakers. I’ve always been interested in starting a journal/blog. Together with my interest in photography, I hope writing this will be a fun way to improve my writing skills, be more reflective, and just overall be able to tell stories better. Writing this blog with me is Winnie. I’ll let her introduce herself in one of her upcoming posts.

Anyways, together we started this blog to document our adventures. Last year we had plenty of those, and for 2018, we decided that we wanted to be more reflective about each day that we go through and be able look back and relive our great experiences. For the longest time, both of us wanted to start a blog. With this joint blog, we can keep each other accountable and keep each other posting. Winnie is my accountability buddy, and I am hers. We share our goals with each other, and we keep each other on track to reach them. I hope this blog will continue with us keeping each other accountable.

The Blog Stack

As a software engineer, I can’t help but to turn this into a little techy blog post. I just wanted to explain our stack, even though it’s very simple: Jekyll and github pages. BAM. Go ahead and make your own blog now! I’ll explain the simple steps here. If you’re confused a quick google should put you on the right track.

1. Create a Github account
2. Find a cool Jekyll theme
3. Find the Github repository for the Jekyll theme
4. Fork it on Github
5. Rename the repository to: YOUR_GITHUB_USERNAME.github.io
6. Clone your forked repository
7. Go to the _posts directory, and make a post
8. Push to master
9. See your beautiful blog

And that’s it! From here, you can learn some CSS and Markdown to make your posts look really cool.

Wins & Ls

So, you win some, you dim sum.

ws-ds: The github organization we’re using to create this page.

I couldn’t help but laugh when Winnie told me this while I having a bad day. I also couldn’t help but stop being sad, and embrace that some days will be bad days, and that’s alright. I’m in the middle of reading “The subtle art of not giving a fuck”, so I guess that helps with this mindset. Anyways, we both wanted this to be theme of the blog; you will win some, and you will lose some, and that’s okay! That’s life! Here, we’ll write about life, and all the wins and loses that we face. Winnie and Aldrin, Winns and Als. Wins and Ls. Get it? 😛

Written on February 3rd , 2018 by Aldrin Balisi