Alicia Liu

I never expected the overwhelming response to my Medium post “Overcoming Impostor Syndrome”. I’ve received so many positive comments from people of all different backgrounds who have experienced similar feelings that the article resonated with them. It has been incredibly rewarding. I still can't believe so many people read it!

One thing I want to address is that I never meant to imply only women get impostor syndrome. I needed a concise definition of impostor syndrome and decided to quote the first academic study that used the term, and that study happened to only study women. It is inconclusive whether women are more likely to experience impostor syndrome. It could even be that men experience it more, but it’s talked about even less. I’ve witnessed very smart men leave the field also, because they didn’t feel they belonged either, and didn’t see themselves advancing down this career path. However, being a very small minority does tend to compound impostor feelings in women, as I imagine it would for men who are not white or asian / south asian, too. I consciously tried not to over-emphasize the gender aspect, but since I'm speaking from my personal perspective, gender is an omnipresent force that colors my experience.

Okay, now I’m going to let you in on a small secret: I didn’t think I was ever going to publish that article. I formally started writing it six months ago, and this topic has been in my spark file for much longer. On December 8, 2012, I started writing the first sentence “Impostor syndrome is a topic that I’ve wanted to cover for a long time”. I had a lot of trouble and many false starts writing about this topic, because of its very personal nature, but also due to impostor syndrome itself. I kept worrying: Do I have any authority to be talking about this? Do I really want people to know I was a veneer all these years? How will people react? The process of writing about it forced me to really examine my own perceptions about my coding abilities and programming in general, across progressive stages of my career. So actually part of overcoming impostor syndrome was the act of writing about it.

The trigger that prompted me to get my act together and actually finish writing the damn thing was a stroke of luck by past Alicia who had decided to spur-of-the-moment sign up future Alicia for a 5 minute talk about impostor syndrome in a friendly environment: the Women Who Code Lightning Talks. I had to scramble and prepare for the talk the night before giving it, because I misremembered the event date. Nonetheless, I received great feedback and encouragement after the talk, which is what spurred me to finally finish writing and publish. Here are some slides from the presentation, and the talk is also on YouTube (I start at 33:04). Enjoy!

I had a great time speaking at HTML5DevConf about refactoring CSS for maintainability. I'm happy to have the opportunity to present twice (I still can't believe the demand!), and glad the audience came away with actionable items. If you have any feedback, let me know!

You can download the slides here.

2012 has drawn to a close, and as I reflect on this past year, I look back on the two things that have most changed my life.

1. Running

I've had the great fortune of being born with genes that are relatively impervious to weight gain, though I'm sure that will change in another decade or two, so regular exercise has never been that high on my priority list. I have done various forms of exercise semi-regularly, but long hours at a sedentary desk job coupled with my lack of hand-eye (or rather any body part with any other body part) coordination and general lackadaisical demeanour, have wrought what can hardly be described as an active lifestyle.

After too many aborted attempts at attending a yoga class, I decided that running might be more suitable for me. No rigid schedule to adhere to, nor costly gym membership or gear to acquire, and I get to take advantage of a willing running buddy in the form of a future husband, and my newly adopted city of San Francisco, where one can run year-round.

I started running in fits and starts, as is my general strategy for these things, and could not even run a mile without taking a break, or make it up one of San Francisco's famous hills without swearing profusely and slowing to a walk, suffering the penalties of years without any real cardio.

After two months of infrequent and lackluster outings, I decided to fully commit myself by signing up for a half-marathon… in mid-November. It was May and I, being a total noob, started training in earnest that early. 2-mile mid-week runs gave way to 3, then 4 within a month. Longer runs on the weekend went from 5 miles to 9 in as many weeks.

It hasn't been without setbacks. I got painful runner's knee after following a crack running plan where I ran 13 miles and 14 miles in consecutive weeks on Vibram soles (no kidding! you say). After taking three weeks off and switching to good ol' grandma-style running shoes with giant marshmallows for soles, I was back at it. I never did run more than 10 miles in training again, with the fastest barely at 9:30min/mi pace, but I somehow miraculously achieved my pie-in-the-sky goal of a sub-2 hour half marathon at Big Sur, clocking in at 1:59:07.

The impact running has had on my life and general well-being is numerous. I have more energy throughout the day, I get stressed less easily, and my sleep has not been this good since I was little. I just all-around feel much better, which I'm sure has all kinds of other good side-effects that I'm not even consciously aware of.

Despite amassing 500 miles this past year - far beyond my wildest reckoning, I still don't find it easy to go for a run. It's hard to get out of a warm bed when it's still dark out, or up from a comfy couch on a sunny afternoon. Harder still not turn back at the 3 mile mark when I had set out for 6. I've had plenty of cheat days. But maybe that runner's high has got me hooked just a little. I sure do hope so, because I plan to keep running for a long time.

2. Stoicism

I think the very act of starting a company makes one philosophical. Every day you're faced with the same questions: What are we doing here? What should we be doing? What does it all mean and to what end? 

Maybe one only becomes philosophical when the whole enterprise is failing - or treading water, which in start-up terms equals failing, which is where I found myself this past year. In my newly acquired free time, I rediscovered my love for reading, a habit that has been woefully neglected in the pursuit of industrious work for far too many years. It was in this period of indiscriminate reading that I fortuitously discovered Stoicism, a philosophy that has been given short shrift due to the appropriation of the word 'stoic' to mean unfeeling and devoid of emotions.

Though I've ventured down the philosophy aisle in the past, I can't say that any amount of reading Camus, watching Waiting for Godot, visiting Tibetan holy sites, practicing yoga, or trying to wrap my head around the jargon that is metaphysics, has caused me to ever seriously re-evaluate how I think or change my thinking in any significant way. Maybe I just haven't been receptive.

Contrary, I've found the ideas of eminent Stoic philosophers, such as Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, and Seneca, to be surprisingly and immediately applicable. Not only applicable, but effective in its aims of becoming more tranquil and happy. Perhaps my engineer mind is naturally drawn to stoic appeals to reason. Stoic teachings have given me new ways of thinking and of dealing with problems, both small and large. And upon further reflection, I really have no large problems to speak of. The effect its influence has had on my personal happiness has been substantial, even in such a short amount of time as a few months.

It's easy to forget that despite two thousand years of human development, human nature has remained remarkably resilient. Video games may have replaced blood sports at the coliseum, but still we grapple with essentially the same problems and we strive for the same things as people have for thousands of years. People much wiser have been thinking about these problems for as long. It's comforting to know that I won't experience something that someone hasn't already experienced many times worse and has graciously shared with everyone ways to deal with it.

Fittingly, the two things that have changed me the most have to do with the body and mind. External circumstances are subject to constant flux, but your body and mind will stay with you. And things that stay with you should not go neglected.

Facebook is supposed to be this magical advertising platform that allows advertisers to target niche demographics to their heart's content. An advertiser's dream, right? Case in point, I - female, prime child bearing age, college educated - have been shown ads seeking not just plain ol' egg donors, but egg donors of Chinese descent. But the legality and ethics of these targeted ads is not what I'm talking about today. (If you're interested in how bad these egg donor ads are, see this.)

Instead, I'm going to talk about this perplexing ad that Facebook deems I really need to see (over and over and over):

I don't know who runs this ad, but I will assume it's a third-party agency for whoever provides this meal service through Zaarly. Anyhow, they decided to target me - female, engaged, living in their service area - for this "Bro Meals" service.

I didn't think it was possible for one little ad to offend me in so many ways, but they have managed to do so in only 17 words. Kudos! There are so many things wrong with this ad, I don't even know where to begin, but let's start breaking it down. This ad helpfully informs me:

I don't know how to take care of my fiancé and he goes hungry

Apparently, it is still solely the woman's job to make sure her man is fed.

Corollary: my fiancé is so inept he can't even feed himself even though he is a fully grown man

I don't know how to cook or cook so badly, that I shouldn't even bother, and instead  just have this attractive blonde lady do it for me

My fiancé self-identifies as a bro, and wants comfort meals tailored to bros, not whatever non-bro crap I'm serving

I apparently don't deserve to eat. Bros only!

Corollary, apparently men and women eat different food (Are there special male enhancement ingredients in these sheperd's pies that non-bros better not eat?)

With great power comes great responsibility. Demographically targeted ads allow for a level of personalized insult that was impossible before.

Now, I'm not saying there's anything wrong with this service. I'm sure Myriah (the attractive blonde) cooks wonderful food and provides a necessary service to lots of busy people. Under different circumstances, say, an ad that simply highlighted the convenience and deliciousness of home-cooked meal delivery, I would surely consider being a customer.

But obviously with a name like "Bro Meals", and the first sentence of her page's copy clearly reading: "Bring some comfort to the bachelor lifestyle with some home cooking that will make your week a breeze" (emphasis mine) she is targeting a specific demographic that does not include me. 

If you host images or other media from Amazon S3, but want to prevent people from linking your image or media files directly (and paying for it!), you can set up the following rules (source) in your S3 bucket to only allow your website(s) to serve the image, and show any other referrer an Access Denied page if another site tries to link to your media directly.

Just replace <Bucket Name> and the websites that should be whitelisted with your bucket name and URLs. Then in your bucket, under "Properties", click "Edit Bucket Policy", and paste the following in. Now if you try to go visit your image or media link directly, you'll get a 403.

https://gist.github.com/3716433

Artist Ji Lee created a series of "words as images", where a descriptive image of a word is created only using the letters in the word itself. There is only one rule: Use only the graphic elements of the letters without adding outside elements.

I was surprised that Tumblr doesn't have recent posts built into its templating language. You can get the same effect by parsing your Tumblr blog's RSS feed, and displaying it as a list in your sidebar.

The RSS feed is in XML - located at http://<yourblog>.com/rss. You can go to any Tumblr blog to see what the XML format looks like.

Here, I fetch the RSS feed using an AJAX call, and parse it, all made quite straight forward with jQuery. I create a list item element for each post "item", containing the title of the post and a link to the post itself, and append it to a <ul> element I already have on the page. You need to add the element <ul id="recent-posts"></ul> to your sidebar in your Tumblr theme, where you want the recent posts to appear.

Below is the JavaScript to add into your Tumblr theme's header inside <script> tags, after where you include jQuery.

https://gist.github.com/3265951

Having female role models has always been held up as one of the best ways to encourage more girls to enter STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields. And I am among those that think role models with feminine traits are even better, so girls could learn that you can be good at math and science, and you can still choose to wear skirts. Especially when trying to influence girls at an age when many care much more about being pretty than being smart.

So it is with great surprise that I came upon recent University of Michigan studies, which found:

Despite good intentions, attempts to glamorize STEM women may be less motivating to girls than more "everyday" female STEM role models, say U-M psychology researchers Diana Betz and Denise Sekaquaptewa.

The researchers conducted two studies about how middle school girls perceive female STEM role models. If women are successful in STEM fields, research indicates others dislike them and label them less attractive, not competent or unable to secure high salaries.

The middle school girls were asked to read articles about women in STEM, some with gender neutral characteristics, e.g. wears glasses and dark clothes, and likes to read, and some with feminine characteristics, e.g. wears make-up and pink clothes, and likes to read fashion magazines. The girls who were not interested in science and math reported even less interest in math, and less likely to study math in the future after reading about the more feminine role models.

This means various efforts at encouraging girls to pursue STEM fields may have unintended and even opposite effects.

The second study found that the reason for this unexpected demotivation may be because the students perceive being both feminine and being stellar in math and science as an unobtainable combination, which makes them feel threatened rather than motivated.

When Marissa Mayer was recently appointed as Yahoo's new CEO, she was heralded as a shining role model, practically an icon, of a woman in tech that has made it to the very top. I myself was happy to see a woman reach the C-suite rising up through the engineering ranks, which is rare even among women C-level executives at tech companies.

However, when shortly thereafter it was publicized that Mayer was pregnant, I wonder if this most rare of combinations - the first ever pregnant Fortune 500 CEO - could have a similar demotivating effect upon women, as seeing the rare combination of feminine STEM role models had on the girls.

Mayer is at the pinnacle of having it all. But as Anne-Marie Slaughter wrote at length for the cover story of the current issue of The Atlantic, "Why Women Still Can't Have it All", having it all is unattainable, at least in today's work climate. As Slaughter tweeted, Mayer is exceptional, not the norm; she's "superhuman, rich, and in charge", while most women having a baby and a demanding career are not.

This is the trailer for the newly released documentary about Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei 艾未未: Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, which I just watched. Ai helped design the iconic Bird's Nest stadium for the Beijing Olympics and then famously boycotted the Games on the grounds that China was using the Olympics for propaganda, among other offences, such as forcefully removing migrant workers from Beijing and preventing local citizens from attending.

The movie showcases Ai's politically charged artwork, and covers his activism, for example, launching his own investigation into how many children died in the massive 2008 Sichuan earthquake due to shoddily built schools, because the government has refused to release the death toll.

The film is hard-hitting about the current political reality in China. Despite economic progress, important human rights - freedom of speech and assembly - have scantly improved. The dangers that face outspoken critics of the Chinese government are very real. Though Ai is very outspoken and critical of the government, many considered him untouchable because of his international fame.

Perhaps to show that no one is untouchable, the government eventually cracked down on Ai, shutting down his blog, demolishing his new art studio, and finally making Ai himself "disappear" last year. Ai was finally released after 81 days, and hit with a bogus tax evasion charge and fined more than US$2M. Ai is not allowed to talk about what happened, and lives under constant surveillance. But Ai's fate is still better than other dissidents, such as Liu Xiaobo 刘晓波, another famous Chinese human rights activist who is currently serving a 11 year sentence for "inciting subversion of state power". Liu was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 for his decades of work promoting human rights progress in non-violent ways, but was even denied the right to have a representative pick up the award while he is incarcerated.

The parts of the film covering Ai's family history were particularly difficult for me to watch. Ai's father, renowned poet Ai Qing, was denounced as 右派 (Right Wing) and brutally persecuted leading up to the Cultural Revolution. This was a frenzied period lasting years in which books and cultural relics were destroyed (my mom told me they sold off books by the pound during this time), and intellectuals and merchants were witch-hunted, had their property seized, publicly humiliated, and sent to far off rural areas for "re-education" (hard manual labor). My grandfather, a philosophy professor, suffered the same indignity, and spent 20 years away, during which my family lived under a black mark. Like Ai's father, my grandfather was fortunately "reinstated" eventually, but nonetheless it was at his urging that my parents made the decision to leave China permanently after 1989's Tiananmen Square protests.

When I visited China in 2007, I think Tiananmen Square had more plainclothed police than actual tourists, due to heightened security leading up to the Olympics. Every visit to China, and particularly in 2009 when I spoke to local Tibetans after the unrest the year before, makes me reflect on the liberties that we take for granted here in North America.

The movie captures the scenes of Ai in New York, where he lived for many years before returning to China in 1993, with nostalgia and a certain reverence for the US. Ai was profoundly influenced by America, and while there photographed and participated in protests, revelling in the freedom.

But even in the US, citizens have to remain vigilant about protecting these freedoms - of speech and expression. While the Internet won at stopping SOPA, it is indeed scary that such a bill in violation of the First Amendment was even created, and even more that it could have been quietly passed.

Technology has enabled unprecedented ability for ordinary citizens to organize, as evidenced by the campaign against SOPA, and countless protests and even revolutions worldwide, which were aided by the rise of social networks. While Facebook has been pushing to enter the lucrative Chinese market, the Great Firewall of China proves a formidable foe, and China has thus far kept Facebook and Twitter out, and even Google eventually abandoned its efforts despite a period of capitulation to China's censorship laws.

Ai Weiwei uses technology heavily, particularly Twitter (through a VPN, even now after his disappearance) to spread awareness and organize protests - a protest can simply be eating together. You can follow him at @aiww, he tweets in Chinese.

I highly recommend this multi-faceted documentary, which lifts the cover on the polished appearance China puts on, from the perspective of a remarkable man, who could have made tons of money as an artist and kept quiet, but instead risks his life and liberty to fight injustice. China won't be changed in a day, but as Ai says in the film,

"I fight so my children don't have to fight same fight".

Finally, the film is entertaining. For a serious documentary, it has its share of laughs, showing off the humorous and irreverent Ai very well. I particularly like the scene of him bringing 冰棍儿 (popsicles - Mungbean flavor, my favorite too!) for his young son, and all the shots of his reportedly 40 cats. So whatever your inclination: human rights, modern art, China, Twitter, or cats, there's something for you.

If you're in San Francisco, you're in luck, Kabuki theater is one of a handful screening this documentary right now. Go see it!

I just got my new Macbook Pro (yeah!), and after I restored from a Time Machine backup of my existing laptop, which is still running Mac OS X 10.6, Postgres wasn't starting (boo!).

Lion now ships with Postgres, which is at /usr/bin/psql, and that's what my mac is trying to use by default, but I want it to use the version I had already installed.

I installed Postgres from the .dmg, unlike most other blog posts and Stack Overflow answers regarding fixing Postgres after 10.7 upgrade which installed Postgres from Homebrew. So my Postgres is located at /Library/PostgreSQL/9.0/bin/psql. In my .bashrc file, I just need to have this path before any reference to /usr/bin.

export PATH=/Library/PostgreSQL/9.0/bin:/usr/bin:$PATH

So now it's using the right version of Postgres, but when I try to start it up, it gives me a weird error about not enough shared memory.

2012-07-12 23:47:10 PDT FATAL: could not create shared memory segment: Invalid argument 2012-07-12 23:47:10 PDT DETAIL: Failed system call was shmget(key=5432001, size=29368320, 03600). 2012-07-12 23:47:10 PDT HINT: This error usually means that PostgreSQL's request for a shared memory segment exceeded your kernel's SHMMAX parameter. You can either reduce the request size or reconfigure the kernel with larger SHMMAX. To reduce the request size (currently 29368320 bytes), reduce PostgreSQL's shared_buffers parameter (currently 3072) and/or its max_connections parameter (currently 104). If the request size is already small, it's possible that it is less than your kernel's SHMMIN parameter, in which case raising the request size or reconfiguring SHMMIN is called for. The PostgreSQL documentation contains more information about shared memory configuration.

After some googling, I figured out where to set these higher SHMMAX values: in /etc/sysctl.conf. You need to create this file if it doesn't exist.

But it still didn't work. The catch was that I had to not only set a higher SHMMAX, but also a corresponding higher SHMALL value. The SHMALL value is in number of pages, and should be SHMMAX * page_size. Page size is 4k, and my Postgres request size is 29368320 bytes, so I set my SHMALL value to 7342. My resulting sysctl.conf:

kern.sysv.shmmax=29368320 kern.sysv.shmmin=1 kern.sysv.shmmni=128 kern.sysv.shmseg=32 kern.sysv.shmall=7342

Make sure you restart after changing sysctl settings, for those changes to take effect. You can use the command sysctl kern.sysv to check your values. After I restarted with these settings, Postgres was back to normal and automatically ran on start up again with all the existing databases and data intact.

Just launched a fun little project we've been working on - CelebJuicer, a website to track conversations between celebrities on Twitter.