My journey

I didn’t grow up around computers. My dad passed when I was young. We had no internet, no machine in the house, no “early hacker” origin story.
My first login was in 2004 at a internet cafe where the fans were louder than my typing.

I still applied to the top three CS programs in Vietnam. I got in. Then I promptly struggled. I couldn’t touch-type. I bombed my first data-structures course lab test even though I aced on the theory part.I spent nights re-learning the basics: pointer diagrams on scrap paper, debugging by printing to stdout because that’s all I knew. Progress looked like this: fewer red errors, more green runs, and a keyboard that finally kept up with my brain.

That grind became a habit. Ship before “ready.” Learn by fixing what I just broke. Small wins compounded into bigger ones.

Since then I’ve built and led systems used at scale across the U.S., Singapore, Canada, and Europe. Cut latency by double digits. Rebuilt legacy platforms that now serve billions of requests. Took research models to production. Titles didn’t do that—shipping did.

Now I’m building an AI product on the side for builders like you: multi-model answers with receipts, retrieval that respects data, speed you can feel, costs you can forecast.

If that’s your lane—developer, indie maker, analyst, operator—follow along. I share the messy parts, the numbers, and the fixes that stick.