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chardata

An interactive color-data explorer built as a Node.js application, created with a Claude workflow. Dive into color datasets and visualizations directly in your browser.

Open chardata → View source on GitHub →

Color Technology articles coming soon.

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My Garden Is Choked with Weeds

Posted on April 12, 2026 by William Li

My garden is choked with weeds. But you can learn from it and avoid choking your code with bugs. All it took was a season of neglect: “It’s raining too much.” “It’s too hot out.” “I’ll take care of it when the weather is nicer.” It’s like bugs and issues in software. Unlike gardens, bugs…

The Unexamined Code Is Not Worth Shipping

Posted on March 28, 2026 by William Li

Socrates famously said “The unexamined life is not worth living.” In the era of AI, we might also say “The unexamined code is not worth shipping.” I used to tell my team that writing a CGATS file parser is a rite of passage for a junior color code jockey. CGATS files are a venerable human-readable…

Fried Dog Sticks, Anyone? Fine-Tuning Isn’t Just for LLMs

Posted on February 22, 2026 by William Li

At our household, a favorite game is to throw different grocery names at the Alexa shopping list and see what the NLQ interpreter comes up with. For many items, like “milk” or “sourdough bread”, Alexa does pretty well across the household. For others, not so much. For example, “fried dough sticks”, which is an English…

Two Views of Product Management

Posted on January 30, 2026 by William Li

There are 2 views of PMs I’ve worked with. PM as initiator — PM figures out why, what, and who. Everything else is someone else’s problem. PM as quarterback — PM is responsible for success of product, measured by the product P&L. Responsible doesn’t mean the PM does everything, but they’re responsible for ensuring it…

Difficult employees should make you look at yourself, not the door.

Posted on January 25, 2026 by William Li

A recent story about an engineer who got fired because she was “difficult” reminded me of another incident from my own distant past, when we were just building up the cloud services dev team by expanding a team who had worked primarily on local apps in the past. At the time, we had a mixed…

Leadership Doesn’t Abandon Team

Posted on January 6, 2026January 6, 2026 by William Li

I read a post recently which was supposedly about where Leadership should spend time.  It embodied everything I think is wrong with corporate leadership today. TLDR, the claim was that if I, as a leader, are constantly managing under-performers, I’m not investing in the people who are actually driving the business forward.  Leaders who find…

Recent Posts

  • My Garden Is Choked with Weeds
  • The Unexamined Code Is Not Worth Shipping
  • Fried Dog Sticks, Anyone? Fine-Tuning Isn’t Just for LLMs
  • Two Views of Product Management
  • Difficult employees should make you look at yourself, not the door.

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