Tomoki Cheung

Background

I was born in Hawaiʻi to first-generation parents, Chinese on my father’s side and Japanese on my mother’s. My father, his brother, and my grandparents left China and started over here without speaking English. What they built is the reason I have the options I do.

Growing up between those two worlds meant a lot of things had to be worked out from scratch. My mother did what she could with the information available to her, but as the eldest I was often the one figuring out how the school system worked, and I was doing it without a map. That was hard at the time. It is also where my habit of checking things myself comes from.

Now

I am a senior at UH Mānoa on the general track for a BS in Computer Science, with an AS in Information Technology from Kapiʻolani Community College. Alongside school I run a small web development studio and build sites for businesses in Honolulu.

I want to work somewhere hardware and software meet. Reading about that intersection is not the same as having built anything on it, so the next step is buying parts and finding out what I do not know. I am deciding between Raspberry Pi builds and taking an off-the-shelf robot and making it do something it was not designed to do.

How I work

Over the past year I have used large language models to build and ship real things, and it has accelerated what I could learn on my own. I think of them the way I think about a phone: a tool that became an extension of how people operate, quickly enough that most of us never decided to let it happen. These systems are heading the same way, and they will shape what people see and do.

That makes this an odd moment to be starting out. It is harder to know what I should be working on. It is also the first time people without a particular background can build things that were closed to them five years ago, and I would not have believed that version of the future.

There is a long way to go before I would call myself good at this. What I try to hold onto is not taking output on faith. When a model tells me something works, I want to know why it works, and I would rather find out I was wrong early than ship something I cannot explain.

Away from the desk

I hike Koko Head. I travel to Japan often to see my mother’s family, and I have been to a handful of prefectures, but Hokkaido is the one that feels like home. Sapporo is where I stay, Hakodate is where I would happily spend more time, and our honke, the main family household, is in Esashi in the northeast. Getting there is an eight hour drive, longer in practice, because we stop to catch up with relatives on the way. The family traces back to Fukui before that.

The seafood has not gotten old once.

My favourite game is Detroit: Become Human. It is a long way from where we are, but between drone development, language models, and the robots coming out of Tesla and Figure, parts of it feel less speculative than they did. I would rather stay optimistic about that than not.