Danny Yang’s Blog

The heatmap is one of my favorite features in Strava.

The other day, I shared a link to my fencing club’s website on social media, and someone commented saying that the website was flagged by their Norton AntiVirus extension.

After participating in Open Data Week earlier this year, I became interested in getting involved in more community initiatives and doing more projects with publicly available data.

Earlier this year, I thought it would be cool to try and understand the “transit connectivity” of each neighborhood.

This is a simple braised chicken with chestnuts that I’ve been making for years.

This is a twist on the classic chicken and ginseng soup, full of nutrients and flavor.

The best way to describe this dish is a cross between oyako-don and gyu-don.

This spring, I completed the Du Bois Challenge - an annual online event where participants are tasked with recreating one of W.E.B Du Bois’s famous data visualizations each week over the course of 10 weeks.

This post describes my experience doing part-time data visualization freelancing on Upwork in 2023.

Are you bored over the holidays and itching to bikeshed over programming language syntax?

This is my third year doing Advent of Code.

Recently I tried my hand at making soup with dried kelp and it turned out pretty good, so here it is.

This is a one-pot meal that I’ve been enjoying quite a bit recently, since I don’t want to go all the way out to Elmhurst for Hainan chicken.

A hearty vegetable soup that I like eating with bread.

This one was inspired by Gordon Ramsay’s 10 minute shrimp scampi recipe, but I’ve made enough changes that I don’t think it qualifies as shrimp scampi anymore.

Sour soups are good to have before meals because they are appetizing (think: hot and sour soup from Panda Express), but this recipe is far lighter and more watered-down than the restaurant version.

Introduction This post is a bit different from my previous posts.

The importance of data visualization is rapidly growing in today’s data-rich world, and web-based interactive visualizations such as those on New York Times or FiveThirtyEight can engage and inform a wide audience.

Why the heck do you even have a yakisoba recipe - isn’t it like ramen where you just follow the instructions on the package?

This recipe is meant for making chicken soup, but if you get the right kind of chicken then you can take it out of the soup to make Hainan chicken.

In part 5 of my Chocopy Compiler Hacking series, I discuss building a backend to compile Chocopy to LLVM using LLVMLite.

Don’t be turned off by this strange ingredient - chicken feet are fantastic for making soup.

This is a nice cold dish for the summer and can be prepared in relatively large quantities.

Another variant of pork bone soup that less sweet and more hearty.

This mildly sweet porridge can be enjoyed hot or cold.

Danny, do you know how to make anything other than pork bone soup?

As with other variants of Cantonese-inspired pork bone soup, this recipe roughly involves throwing pork bones, carrot, and one other ingredient into a pot and cooking for a few hours.

The almonds and carrots add a rich and slightly sweet flavor that is absorbed by the dried vegetables.

One of my favorite variants of pork bone soup, this one is good for summer because fresh water chestnuts are light, crispy, and sweet.

This classic Chinese soup is surprisingly cheap and easy to make, and it’s very hard to mess up.

This is a quick recipe for a light and savory soup that you can make with fish bones.

At the beginning of 2023, I published a functional programming book.

This post is a list of examples of a rather niche genre of media I like to call the bartender/barista genre.

This post contains a set of D3.js visualizations to explore Edward Tufte’s concept of “data-ink”.

This year, I decided to do Advent of Code using Erlang.

In the fourth part of my Chocopy Compiler Hacking series, I will be discussing how I built the backend to compile Chocopy to WebAssembly.

ReScript is a robustly typed language that compiles to efficient and human-readable JavaScript.

When browsing programming forums online, I often see people ask questions along the lines of “is a background in PL/compilers useful in industry?”

Learning D3 from scratch is not easy - breaking API changes mean that examples and tutorials are frequently outdated, and the advent of Observable means that official examples from recent years are not directly runnable.

In the third part of my Chocopy Compiler Hacking series, I will be discussing how I built the backend to compile Chocopy to Microsoft’s Common Intermediate Language (CIL).