A bit about my background: I was born and raised in China but went to school in Birmingham, Alabama, which naturally brought me to history, particularly nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history. I wrote my thesis on Cold War (il)liberalism's impact on the origin of China and Asia-Pacific studies by tracing the life of UW professor George Edward Taylor, founder of the Jackson School.
My interest in Informatics started with an attempt to build an archive of my high school's student newspapers, products of a rare, radical progressive educational experiment that thrived in 1960s Civil Rights Alabama. That pulled me into archival practice, digitization pipelines, library tech stacks (with some complaints), and eventually hands-on work in branch operations at UW Libraries.
Along with my academic pursuits, I'm a “natural-born” DevOps. I'm an enthusiast of homelabs, self-hosted services (shoutout to r/selfhosted), FOSS, and all things computing that localize data, decentralize governance, and prioritize privacy.
