Recently, I have been reading novels of different languages in my spare time. After reading some, it occurs to me that one question appears in my mind: What makes one understand human languages? I believe it has already been discussed and solved by linguisticians, but it is necessary to think of it when teaching computers those human languages. When implementing compilers, how do we translate programming languages into machine languages? We split the text into tokens, check for syntax errors, and report them to the programmer.

What is the ultimate answer? No. I don’t mean the answer 42, which you got from the movie. I mean the real one. Let’s say we want to build some program to simulate a universe, or merely a world. What are the very basic elements and equations in your code? After thinking of it for a moment, you may come up with some answers like “something from math, something from physics, and something from chemistry.

About six to seven years ago, around 2011 and 2012, I owned my blog for the first time. I hosted my blog on my personal computer, and I used to keep it running only for weekends. It was the good old days in my eyes, and I wrote articles about education, philosophy, the “great ideas” and anything that came to my mind. To keep it easy to maintain, I was using Wordpress along with Markdown support.

Lately, I’ve been designing a complete open-source smart home resolution in my mind inspired by the Apple’s eco-system. It consists of several different parts that would cover almost everything in both real and digital life. For real life, there should be a home security guard, a health tracking system, a IoT system that controls cleaning robots, automobiles, doors and windows. For digital life, there should be a file storage service, a messaging and meeting service and a security system.

Just a few days ago, I happened to find this book in the library when I was looking for another book on Software Engineering. It attracts me first by its title, for I was wondering what ‘man-month’ is and why this book is there. Then I began to read. The book tells the reader (particularly the product managers) the very basic principles to develop software. It first interests the reader by introducing the origin and the tough things of software development and then explains the ideas in detail smoothly.