Written by Xiaofeng Yue

About

Yo!

Xiaofeng here. I’m a software engineer based in the beautiful city that’s called Vancouver (the Canadian one). I also lived in a couple other countries for a few years before relocating in 2018.

My first name Xiaofeng [Sh-OW-f-uh-ng]▷, is pronounced very similar to SHAW-phone. It came from the combination of two Chinese characters romanized by pinyin (literally means spelled sounds). So in this case, it’s xiào (4th tone i.e. falling tone) + fēng (1st tone i.e. flat tone) = Xiaofeng.

But for those who are not familiar with the Chinese language system, here’s a GNU-flavored mnemonic recursive acronym that I totes made up to help with the spelling (for the record, I don’t think the acronym XIAOFENG exists for reals):

Xiaofeng Is An Old-Fashioned ENGineer

Some fun facts about myself:

  1. My family name Yue means Great Mountain in Chinese, although I should hike a lot more to live up to the name! In the words of the old country, Yue is 岳 - since Chinese is a pictogram language, a few millenniums ago, the character was initially scripted on oracle bones to resemble mountains before it evolved to its modern form on the right: yue
  2. Part of my first name, feng (Chinese character: 峰; similar etymology to my surname 岳, as they share the same building block 山 that hints a character is mountain-related), means Peak in Chinese.. IKR? In a parallel universe, there must be a great explorer and mountaineer Xiaofeng Yue who’s our Edmund Hillary equivalent!
  3. Not to label myself (definitely not a nihilist), but I have to admit that I am a huge fan of Rick and Morty. Do yourself a favor, watch it if you haven’t.
  4. I used to study in Harbin, a city in Northern China that’s not far from Siberia. Winter there can be -30 degrees Celsius (sounds familiar eh?).
  5. I have two master’s degrees. Barely a “fun” fact as both were somewhat Pyrrhic victories that inflicted certain amount of pain upon me then. But as what people say, while pain may be inevitable, suffering is optional - I learnt so much about discipline and life priorities (and ofc, knowledge too) along the journey, so I hereby decree this too, shall now be a fun fact.
  6. I once won (hu) on the first tile discarded in Sichuan-style Mahjong 🀅, which is called Earth’s Grace, a hand with a chance of 1 in ~3.2 million. To do a back-of-the-envelope estimate, with 5 games per hour on average, if we played 8 hours every single day of the year, then this’d happen once in ~219 years, i.e. approximately from when Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804, all the way to 2023.

This is my corner of the web, and is an uncensored personal space - I am the self-appointed (and opinionated) BDFL here. I like to ramble about random stuff, most likely on the areas of tech, books, movies and whatnot, which should be categorized in Tags. I will refrain from talking about politics of any kind though, in case I need to run for office one day!

PS. I turned off Disqus for this site, mostly cuz I don’t expect a lot of traffic or comments, and that I intend to keep it Web 1.0, at least for the time being. But if you would like to reach out, feel free to message me on LinkedIn.

PPS. It goes without saying - yet I probably should say it anyways: The opinions expressed in this blog are my own views and not those of my employer.

Peace!