Experience
Slab Co-founder/CTO Jun 2017 — Dec 2023
- Co-founded and scaled Slab to multi-million dollar ARR and profitability with backing from Matrix Partners, CRV, and NEA, achieving 3x year-over-year growth at peak.
- Drove development for Slab's team knowledge management platform, adopted by clients including Asana, Ramp, and Forbes, offering intuitive content creation, organization, and seamless integrations with tools including Slack, Google Drive, and GitHub for search and sync.
- Led majority of company operations, managing Engineering with 1 manager and 7 senior+ engineers, Support with 1 lead and 2 specialists, and 2 recruiters. Established company-wide processes for hiring, mentoring, performance management, and engineering excellence.
- Designed client-side architecture and strategy with TypeScript, React, GraphQL/Apollo, and Storybook across web, browser extension, Electron desktop, and Cordova mobile apps. Implemented best practices including component-driven development, cohesive design systems, pragmatic testing, and rigorous code reviews.
- Implemented the core client application, delivering key features including a post viewer with dynamic layouts and real-time collaboration, topic system with flexible permissions and mass drag-and-drop reorganization, a universal content importer, and an integration framework with 50+ enterprise tools for content syncing, embedding, and authentication.
Airbnb Senior Software Engineer Apr 2016 — Jun 2017
- Spearheaded Airbnb Plus as a founding engineer, establishing the technical foundation for new user-facing listing pages and internal tools for quality audits and photography to support the premium listing segment.
- Orchestrated a company-wide Swift 2 to 3 migration in collaboration with Apple, driving cross-team alignment and leading a 3-person team to achieve zero development freezes or production regressions through phased rollout and systematic benchmarking.
- Built the React Native host dashboard as part of a major app redesign, implementing complex calendar layouts and dynamic income visualizations across iOS and Android.
Backplane Lead Software Engineer Feb 2012 — Apr 2016
- Led a 4-person frontend team developing a social platform for high-profile clients, including Lady Gaga, Coca-Cola, and MLBPA. Drove early React adoption, migrating from Backbone.js and establishing modern frontend practices.
- Developed key features, including full site redesigns, a high-performance masonry layout for media-rich feeds, a threaded comment system, and a real-time chat supporting hundreds of concurrent users.
Early Career
WePay Software Engineer Intern Jul 2011 — Sep 2011
Designed and implemented a store that is embeddable in any page, which made to the TechCrunch and drew 300 new sellers for WePay on the launch day alone.
Wandoujia Software Engineer Intern May 2010 — July 2010
Built a dashboard using HTML, CSS and JavaScript as the front-end developer for Wandoujia, the missing managing software for Android phones.
Personal Projects
Created a product transforming GitHub activities into human-readable changelogs using LLMs. Optimized performance and cost through model benchmarking and prompt engineering across GPT-3.5 turbo, GPT-4 mini, and Claude 3 Haiku. Built with Next.js, Tailwind CSS, and React Server Components on Vercel.
WhatFont Apr 2011 — Mar 2024
Created a popular browser extension for web typography inspection with 3-million+ weekly users. Built with React and Tailwind CSS.
Archived Projects
- WhatFont App: Same WhatFont experience, now available on the iPhone, iPad, and iPod Touch.
- Bamboo App and Extension: Save and share web highlights through Bamboo's iOS App, Chrome extension and Safari extension.
- AlbumColors.js: Create a color pallete from an image in JavaScript. Inspired by iTunes 11's album view.
- Earth Pulse: Track earthquakes with social media.
- UIUC CS 473 Grader Helper: A Python script to help CS 473 UIUC grader smoothen the grading process by auto handling homework files.
- UIUC Course Open API: Provide an open API for UIUC hackers as an infrastructure to build UIUC hacks.
- Innovation Works Website: Built the official website for the most important Chinese tech incubator.
Education
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science