My career is amazing. It's funny, but I didn't know that until I found out I was going to have to find a new job. That it was going to happen soon. That it was real. Then I thought about a lot of stuff. Things I hadn't thought about for a long time. I guess I kind of took my current position for granted or something. I mean, stable tech jobs are just always there. You expect them to always be giving you interesting problems to solve or systems to optimize or code to refactor to grow up to be a more well-rounded engineer one day. And make you get up early for standups and sprint planning and all that other stuff that used to drive me crazy. I don't feel that way now. Everything's different since I realized the tech industry is volatile. Since I realized that one day in the near future, these chores might not be around to drive me crazy.
Now I feel lucky when a PR gets harshly critiqued or when production go down during my on-call rotation. Now I feel lucky when I see a failing CI notification which has nothing to do with my changes. When the Elastic Search server on prod goes down when I imported some indices. I even like digging through Kibana logs at 2 AM hunting down bugs to find out logs are missing. It means I'm still employed. One day I might not have these problems to solve. Still a backend engineer. Still rotating as the on-duty engineer every couple weeks, living the code farmer's life.
I'm a backend engineer and I'm annoyingly thorough. I mean, super detail-oriented annoying. I know the most random stuff. Like how Domain-Driven Design isn't just fancy buzzwords but actually keeps your codebase maintainable when features grow iteration after iteration and everything threatens to spiral out of control. And how a single N+1 query can break our entire MySQL connection pool when a sale is going on. I don't realize what a geek I am for doing it, I'm just really into backend development. I'm told I'm a pretty good engineer. I get a lot of practice, that's for sure.
My Experience:
Backend Engineer - Cyberbiz
Aug. 2024 - Present
• Built and optimized e-commerce features for 10K+ merchants and 10M+ users (Rails, ES, Redis)
• Designed Message Center backend architecture (NestJS, PostgreSQL)
• Developed AI Meta Ad platform with Graph API and MCP (FastAPI, Vertex AI)
• Survived multiple on-call rotations with dignity mostly intact
Software Engineer Intern - CommScope
Jun. 2022 - Aug. 2022
• Developed backend infrastructure features (Go, Vue)
• Deployed monitoring tools with Helm (Prometheus, Grafana)
Education:
• M.S. Electrical & Computer Engineering - University of Michigan
• B.S. with Honours, Electrical Engineering & Computer Science - National Chiao Tung University
Technical Skills:
Languages: Ruby, TypeScript, Python, C++, Go, SQL
Frameworks: Ruby on Rails, NestJS, FastAPI, Vue
Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Redis
Tools: Git, Kibana, Athena, Elasticsearch, Docker, Kubernetes, Helm
When I'm Not Coding:
• Breaking Bad marathons (and Better Call Saul!)
• Traveling solo with one bag because my friends are always "busy" (they exist, I swear)
• Lifting weights (it helps, especially for debugging)
• Hiking to give my eyeballs a break from my tmux sessions (doctor's order)