What are you reading?
Posted: Sat Jul 12, 2025 3:40 am
From his experience working with improvisation in dance, Cheng said he loves trying to create the conditions within which people contribute their best work and feel good about what they’re doing. His team is focused on fighting for users and constantly making the website better for the public. “I also serve the digital librarians who are collecting and providing content for our patrons,” Cheng said. “I am giving them the tools, platform and environment to do their magic.”
Tell us something about your role at the Internet Archive that most people wouldn’t know about.
Simultaneously with supporting the Archive’s mission and helping our patrons, I am always holding in the back of my mind the subtext of a “small team, long term.” These ideas guide choices around phone number database process, technologies and architecture. We regularly discard choices that would entail too much complexity or require too much on-going, hands-on maintenance. And we try to resist rushing features out the door that will only add to our technical debt later.
What is the most interesting project you’ve worked on at the Internet Archive?
I set up a wiki to allow scholars to submit transcriptions of scanned Balinese palm leaves.
What has been your greatest achievement (so far) at the Internet Archive?
Creating a team that likes working together, is resilient through conflicts and pushes each other to keep getting better.
The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. It’s a contemporary writing style manual that incorporates cognitive science and linguistics and acknowledges the evolving nature of language.
Tell us something about your role at the Internet Archive that most people wouldn’t know about.
Simultaneously with supporting the Archive’s mission and helping our patrons, I am always holding in the back of my mind the subtext of a “small team, long term.” These ideas guide choices around phone number database process, technologies and architecture. We regularly discard choices that would entail too much complexity or require too much on-going, hands-on maintenance. And we try to resist rushing features out the door that will only add to our technical debt later.
What is the most interesting project you’ve worked on at the Internet Archive?
I set up a wiki to allow scholars to submit transcriptions of scanned Balinese palm leaves.
What has been your greatest achievement (so far) at the Internet Archive?
Creating a team that likes working together, is resilient through conflicts and pushes each other to keep getting better.
The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker. It’s a contemporary writing style manual that incorporates cognitive science and linguistics and acknowledges the evolving nature of language.