Tomoki Cheung

I am studying Computer Science at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa on the general track, with an AS in Information Technology from Kapiʻolani Community College. Alongside school, I run a small web development studio in Honolulu and build sites for businesses that do not have anyone technical on staff.

I am interested in eventually working somewhere between hardware and software. So far, most of what I have actually built has been on the software side. Reading about hardware is not the same as building with it, so the next step is to buy parts and start finding out where my understanding breaks down. I have considered starting with a Raspberry Pi or taking an off-the-shelf robot and trying to make it do something beyond what it was originally set up to do.

How I work

I use large language models heavily when I work, and over the past year they have let me attempt things earlier than I otherwise could have. That also creates a different problem: it is possible to make something work before fully understanding why it works.

Because of that, I try to verify what I am given instead of accepting it at face value. I check for exposed credentials before commits. If I add a safeguard, I try to make it fail so I know it is actually doing something. I keep a written record of mistakes and how they were found, although I have learned that writing a problem down and actually fixing it are two different things.

When a model tells me something works, I want to understand why. I would rather discover early that I misunderstood something than ship something I cannot explain. I am still learning where these tools help me move faster and where using them too quickly can hide gaps in what I know.

Background

I was born in Hawaiʻi to immigrant parents. My father, his younger brother, his parents, and several relatives on his side came to Hawaiʻi from China without speaking English and with limited resources. My mother comes from a large family in Hokkaido. Her side rarely visits Hawaiʻi, so my mother, my brother, and I have usually been the ones traveling to Japan to see them.

Growing up between those two sides of my family gave me a somewhat unusual upbringing. A lot of my perspective comes from moving between different places, families, and ways of doing things.

Away from the desk

I have been to a handful of prefectures in Japan, but Hokkaido is the one that feels most familiar. Sapporo is usually where I stay, and Hakodate is somewhere I would happily spend more time. Our honke, the main family household, is in Esashi in the northeast. Getting there from Sapporo takes most of a day in practice because we usually stop to visit relatives along the way. The family traces back to Fukui before Hokkaido.

Kyoto is the other place I keep returning to. There is something about it I have never been able to explain particularly well. Even with the crowds, I still find parts of it unusually quiet.

My favorite game is Detroit: Become Human. I do not expect its version of androids or artificial intelligence to become reality as the game presents them. What I like is the question underneath the fiction: what happens when a technology develops faster than people decide what role it should have? The game pushes that idea far beyond where current technology is, but the question itself is part of why I am interested in AI, robotics, and the relationship between software and the physical world.