sean zhang

About Me

I am a 4th year CS student at the University of Waterloo.

I use my website to document things I’ve been thinking about or have been doing.


Email	`[firstName][at][this fqdn]`
GitHub	sean01zhang
LinkedIn	in/sean01zhang

Posts

Why I Built Window Switcher
Since finishing my last internship, I’ve missed having massive monitors at work. No longer could I have two windows in split view without sacrificing content space.
This meant that I had many apps occupying one desktop at once. However, as a certified non-minimalist^TM, I have too many windows open. For example, I have multiple instances of Firefox open (one for each profile), multiple instances of Finder with different folders open, and if I wasn’t a vim user, I would have many different instances of my favourite GUI-based code editor open (one for each repository I was working on).
2025-01-23 | 443 words
#window-switcher
Feeding Sourdough Starter
This playbook documents how you should feed your starter. It assumes you have a starter already.
State
Note
Using a transparent container to store your starter makes it easier to know how active your starter is.
There is a gradient of which how hungry/active your starter is, and it can usually be gauged by the volume that your starter takes up.
Not fed in a while: Not bubbly, and may have a clear fluid on top (referred to as hooch). This fluid smells like alcohol and is a byproduct of fermentation. A build-up of this fluid usually indicates that your starter needs to be fed. Pour it out before the next feeding. This will be the smallest in volume it can be.
2025-01-02 | 494 words
#sourdough
🍞🪵 :: 2024-12-30
Bread making log, Dec 30. I made 2 loaves, so this will be two parts.
Loaf 1
- Fed starter 1:1:1 at 10pm, left at RT
  - 200g ea
- Used starter around 11:30am
  - starter more than doubled, overfilled
- Mixed in water and dough first
- Then incorporated the starter
- Then added salt
- Poor mixture, it was quite lumpy
- did not pass windowpane test, dough was not airy
- Dough still sticky after last stretch and fold, shaped into a ball
- waited 10-15 mins
- Put into banneton
- Fridge overnight
- Preheat both dutch ovens no lid
- Put in oven 10:40am
- Did not take out to score until preheated
- did not shape, boule was firm and skin was dry
- A lot more expansion
- Expansion potentially caused crusting to not be as burned
  - This could also be conflated with 19 mins lid off
- Scoring went too far along the sides, reduce length of cross. Depth was slightly deep too.
Loaf 2
- 1:1:1 on stbl starter
  - 120g
- Used starter around 7pm, last fed 10pm but in fridge. Taken out around 2/3pm (5 hour warm up)
- Mixed all together, started with 250g (1.5 cup) water — added another 1/4 as needed
- did not pass windowpane test, was a bit dry
- Left in oven to proof on “proof” setting
- Stretch and fold focused on not ripping the dough
- Much more stretchy than earlier one after stretch and fold.
- Put in oven 10:40am
- Did not take out to score until preheated
- did not shape, boule was firm and skin was dry
- A lot more expansion
- Expansion potentially caused crusting to not be as burned
  - This could also be conflated with 19 mins lid off
- Scoring went too far along the sides, reduce length of cross. Depth was slightly deep too.
2025-01-01 | 288 words
#sourdough
Added more buttons to my homepage!
Nice.
2024-12-31 | 1 words
#update #microblog
New Sourdough Bread 🍞
Reference Recipe: King Arthur no knead
Supplemental Videos Watched:
- Bake the Perfect Sourdough Bread: A Step-by-Step Guide (Natashas Kitchen)
- Make Beautiful Sourdough | NYTimes
This playbook documents the process needed to create a sourdough from your starter in as much detail as possible.
Prologue
- Make sure the sourdough starter is very active (it was fed recently)
  - If refrigerated, feed it a bit and leave it up to 2 hours in room temperature.
Recipe
Note: To try: maybe an autolyse to build more gluten to trap bubbles? Incorporate starter, then incorporate salt? 2% Salt? But higher salt content allows for more flexibility
2024-12-30 | 481 words
#sourdough
🍞🪵 :: 2024-12-27
Bread making log, Dec 27
- Starter successfully doubled in size 2 hours after feeding.
- Required amt. in recipe called for about half
- Fed around 60g of flour and water (Resultant wt: 500g). Split into two jars, approximately 250g each.
- Original in plastic container (nightly release), and new fork in glass jar (stable, weekly feeding)
- Plastic container will be placed in fridge due to production freeze lasting Sat - Sun (inclusive).
- Glass jar will be placed in fridge, to be fed around 1 January (6 days from now).
- Will attempt to not stretch too much to avoid breaking bubbles (in response to dough being a bit dense)
- Did not transfer to clean bowl after last stretch and fold
- Taken out 10 hours after resting
- shaped bread by stretching and folding a bit
- Placed into clean floured bowl and put in oven on “proof” for 1:30, lid on
  - Dough was more bubbly than last time
  - Dough stuck to walls of the bowl, added flour to compensate
- Bake time good, think I needed more scoring
  - AI: Make sure scores are long so they can expand
- Seasoned dutch oven with olive oil; Very smoky after preheat.
  - AI: After preheat, make sure to take dutch oven lid off under range hood. Also, olive oil is not low smoke point.
- Puffier after baked
2024-12-27 | 217 words
#sourdough
Heap Escape Analysis in Go
Warning
This page is extremely rough and will contain incorrect code and lack of explanation.
I want to figure out if my go program is making any allocations to the heap.
```
go test -run none -bench . -benchtime 10s -benchmem
```
Output:
```
goos: darwin
goarch: arm64
pkg: src.naesna.es/aoc/go/2024
cpu: Apple M1 Pro
BenchmarkDay1Part1-10              56686             62211 ns/op           83192 B/op         26 allocs/op
PASS
ok      src.naesna.es/aoc/go/2024       4.405s
```
You can also get a memory profile
```
-memprofile mem.out
```
Then use go tool pprof to check allocation space.
2024-12-08 | 110 words
#rough #golang
Advent of Code 2024, Day 5 Part 2
I wanted to write about this day, since I thought of a nice way to solve this, which is the first time I’ve actually used this algorithm outside of class.
I’ll give a bit of a teaser: Topological Sort.
Problem
Go check out the real website, https://adventofcode.com/2024/day/5 for a full picture, but I’ll try to give as concise of a summary as possible.
Your Input
1. You are given a set of rules, like a|b, meaning number a must come before number b
2. You are given a few arrays of numbers, and
  1. For Part 1, you must sum the middle number of all arrays that conform to the above set of rules.
  2. For Part 2, you must sort the invalid arrays and find the sum of their middle numbers.
Solution
Context You are only given the first problem until you solve the second one.
2024-12-08 | 644 words
#Advent of Code 2024 #Advent of Code