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Full paper: seam_carving.pdf · Code: YuXiangLo/NTUPDP2026 Joint work with Ya-Chen Wu and Yu-Hsiang Lo, NTU Parallel Programming, Spring 2026. The Starting Point Seam carving is a content-aware image resizing algorithm. Instead of cropping or scaling, it removes the least important pixel paths — seams — from the image, leaving the interesting parts intact. The results look surprisingly good. The algorithm has two heavy stages. First, compute an energy map (gradient magnitude, one pass over the image). Then, run a dynamic program (DP) to find the lowest-energy connected path from top to bottom. Remove the seam. Repeat. ...

Yesterday marks the end of a remarkable chapter for me at ShopBack, as I wrap up my six-month journey on Town Hall day — filled with gratitude, memories, and excitement for what’s ahead. Over the past half year as a Software Engineer Intern in the Backend Core-Experience Team, I’ve had the chance to work across a variety of impactful projects — from Customer and Watchlist Service, to Notification Service, and finally the Travel project. It’s been an incredible experience contributing to a high-traffic, real-world system and making my first tangible impact as an engineer. ...

The Context Shopback’s backend runs on a set of microservices — each service owns its domain, communicates over the network, and scales independently. This architecture is well-understood and has obvious benefits. It also has a cost: idle containers still occupy allocated resources. When a service is running but not handling traffic, you’re paying for it anyway. The decision to migrate toward a monorepo structure was partly about this. With a TypeScript monorepo, multiple services can share the same process and resource pool. The idle overhead shrinks. The machine bill shrinks with it. ...

There was a feature I worked on at Shopback that I almost didn’t think twice about. The ask was simple: the PM had a design for a selection panel inside the app — a small UI element where users choose from a list. The design called for adding merchant icons to each entry. My part was coordinating with the frontend team to make sure the integration was wired up correctly on the backend side. It wasn’t technically involved. It was cooperation work: PM had a vision, design had an artifact, and I helped connect the pieces so it could ship. ...

The Setup April 2025. Six people, one semester, and a goal: ship a complete 2D platformer in Unity. The game is called Bubblo. You play as a bubble creature exploring a pixel-art Wonderland, rescuing villagers trapped in cages, and fighting off needle-type enemies — bees, jumping spiders, a unicorn that very much wants to pop you. The core mechanic is bubble physics: bouncing and floating through levels, using your softness as both a movement tool and a combat advantage. ...

The End of the First One April 20th. My last day at CMoney after nine months as a Backend Development Engineer Intern. First internships are strange. You don’t know what you don’t know, so you can’t tell what’s normal and what’s specific to the place you landed. Looking back now, I think I got lucky in the specific way that matters: I landed somewhere with real code, real scale, and a mentor who took the teaching part seriously. ...