The honest version
I almost wrote this the easy way. Pull up the top resumes online, borrow the formula, assemble something similar. Then I remembered a promise I made to myself: to become someone my childhood self would be proud of. So here is the honest version instead.
I grew up in Urumqi, China, and moved to the United States to chase my own version of the American dream. I got my computer science degree from San Diego State University and have spent the last seven years working as a full stack and software engineer. But software engineer, machine learning engineer, these are just titles to me. What I actually care about is staying curious and building things I am proud of.
What I'm chasing
I want to build products that are excellent. In design, in code structure, in performance, in scalability. I know excellent is relative, and no codebase is perfect. That tension is the pursuit.
But software engineering was never just about the code. It is also about managing team relationships, mentoring the next generation of programmers, coordinating between different personalities in a company, and understanding what a CTO or a customer actually needs versus what they say they need. It is about leading by showing up and doing the work, not by telling people what to do, and building an environment where people are pursuing something they care about rather than collecting a paycheck.
I am not in this field to chase pay. I am in it to build things that are net positive for the world, and, selfishly, to buy my wife a piece of land someday with horses, cows, and dogs running around it. I believe that if you build something genuinely good, the financial value follows. It does not lead.
I am also a purple belt in Jiu Jitsu. One of my coaches once told us: we don't compete to win. We compete to become better versions of ourselves, and winning is just the byproduct. I try to apply that same philosophy to building products and companies.
“The pursuit is making the thing better. The winning, the revenue, the growth, is what comes along with doing that well.”
How I work
I don't like boxing myself into a subtitle: full stack, DevOps, frontend, whatever. I am interested in technology broadly, and I like expanding what I know every day. I have worked across the stack, from vanilla JavaScript, HTML, and CSS on the frontend, to frameworks like Angular and React, to Node and Python on the backend. But the actual skill I trust most is adapting fast to something new and turning it into a working product.
I led engineering at a research nonprofit in San Diego, where I was the sole architect for the full stack: Python backend, database, AWS infrastructure, a browser extension, and self hosted infrastructure for an in house, Google Drive style application handling sensitive data for five to ten thousand active daily users. I was also a founding engineer at Vistry AI, building an HR assistant that helped Fortune 500 companies process employee documents. Currently I am a core engineer at a top fitness and health app on iOS and Android, where I also lead a small team on new AI projects across design, research, and implementation.
Right now my own curiosity is pointed at machine learning. I have taken ML and AI courses before, but in college I never had the time to go deep. I was too busy surviving the semester. Now, on my own time, I am learning it from the ground up: currently implementing neural nets from scratch in pure Python, no PyTorch, no shortcuts. A good friend once told me that to really master something, you need to go two or three abstraction layers below it and understand it at the atomic level. That is the approach.
Where I land
We live in an uncertain, strange time. But I believe that clarity comes with time, and that on the other side of this uncertainty is something net positive for humankind. I think it is part of my responsibility, as an engineer and just as a person, to help build that world, one good product at a time.
I am happy. Genuinely. Being alive in an era where all of human knowledge is a search away, and I can actually go learn it and use it, is not something I take for granted.