probablyalex

In the west of San Francisco, between the Presidio and Golden Gate Park, there’s a hidden gem that serves one of the most important purposes in the world.

A few months ago, I wrote about momentum, finding the right hill, and rolling down it.

A couple of weeks ago, I was at a Y Combinator event hosted for Waterloo students interested in entrepreneurship.

Quick post to recap what I learned during my exchange experience!

I wanted to share five impactful learnings I was lucky to discover during my co-op at Shopify, one of the biggest tech companies in the world and one with a great engineering culture.

About Alex Zhu

Fun fact: Ontario, Canada has over 330 provincial parks and more lakes than anywhere else on Earth: 20% of the world’s freshwater supply is stored in Ontario’s 250,000 lakes alone!

The University of Waterloo Debate Society had the incredible opportunity of competing at the Panama World Universities Debating Championship 2025.

Prologue # During the past weekend, I went to compete at the Léger Cup 2025.

I really enjoyed studying with some YouTube mixes this term.

I wanted to share a few lessons I learned during this co-op search that aren’t immediately obvious:

As a part of CS 348, Introduction to Database Management, we had the option to create a project using a database.

I spent the winter break in Vietnam competing at the World Universities Debating Championship 2024, and also filmed a vlog for it!

How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.

Last weekend, The UW Debate Society went to McGill Canadian Central Novice Championship 2023 and had a great time!

Project-based learning is one of the most enjoyable and effective ways to learn new skills.

If you haven’t yet, make sure to read A Case for Digital Minimalism.

A while ago, I was reading The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, and came across this footnote.

While I was writing a Facebook post introducing my friend David as director of a debate tournament, I started thinking about the creative writing process and whether AI would be able to do it or not.

If you implement these three tips, you will increase your chances of being accepted.

This is what I learned about studying and lifestyle during my first study term in Software Engineering at Waterloo!

I wanted a simple blog website that was easy to set up and use, and also one where I had ownership and customization: the answer was a Hugo static site hosted on GitHub Pages.

No one really teaches Git and GitHub, but it’s a must-know if you’re ever going to develop software in a group (like at a company).

Our final project for SE101 was supposed to be a exercise tracker device that would revolutionize the fitness experience.

Please read: this is not about relationships.

This is the Readme file from our Grade 12 summative project.