/ Recent content in jeffyang.io on Hugo -- gohugo.io Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/career-growth-as-an-engineer/ Mon, 06 Oct 2025 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/career-growth-as-an-engineer/ It’s been a while since I last wrote here — work and life have been full, and writing fell off my routine. A lot has changed since then. Over the past three years, I’ve gone from an IC3 engineer to IC5 at Meta. It’s been fast, chaotic at times, and full of learning curves. This post isn’t advice — just a few honest notes on what that journey looked like for me. /posts/first-three-months-at-meta/ Sun, 23 Oct 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/first-three-months-at-meta/ It’s been over 3 months since I started my first job out of college - and I wanted to leave a blog post about it. A few things I’ll cover in this blog post: my bootcamp experience at Meta, and the onboarding process after team selection. Bootcamp Experience Most of you are probably wondering what I mean by bootcamp. Isn’t that a military thing where new recruits go through weeks of basic military training? /posts/configuring-portable-dotfiles/ Sat, 30 Jul 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/configuring-portable-dotfiles/ I recently stumbled across a problem that I never really had to solve before. As I started my first full-time job, I received a new laptop for work-related use. I also set up my development server, which is a remote computer sitting somewhere in a data center that I can SSH into for development purposes. As my preferred choice of text editor is Neovim, I have a lot of configuration files that go along with it. /posts/navigating-a-computer-science-degree/ Sat, 19 Mar 2022 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/navigating-a-computer-science-degree/ I just completed my degree in computer science at Northwestern University. Coming into college, I hadn’t written a single line of code. Not even a line of “hello world”. I never saw myself majoring in a science/engineering field. Throughout my middle school and high school life, I always considered myself more gifted in things like public speech and debate - so naturally, I considered going into law, although it was more just a mere stream of thought than a decisive opinion. /posts/practical-application-of-redis-cache/ Sat, 18 Dec 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/practical-application-of-redis-cache/ Recently, I’ve been working on a side project - a web application (inretrospect.finance) that lets users record their investments with notes for future reference. The whole project is built on top of a fantastic API from Alphavantage that provides detailed financial data on public companies. While it would have been great if it were possible to make unlimited API requests - their free tier plan only allows for 5 requests per minute and 500 requests per day. /posts/my-facebook-internship/ Wed, 08 Sep 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/my-facebook-internship/ I started my journey in computer science as a freshman in college. Little did I know, this journey would take me to the heart of Silicon Valley. In this blog post, I share my experience as a software engineer intern at Facebook. For those who are trying to gauge if Facebook is the right fit - I hope this post will provide valuable insight. For those who are on the grind for an internship - I hope this will serve as a source of inspiration to keep going. /posts/fumi-internship-2/ Sat, 13 Mar 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/fumi-internship-2/ Disclaimer This post does not in any way represent the views of Fumi as a company, but is solely my individual opinion and reflection on my experience as a software engineer at an early-stage startup I was a software engineering intern, after all - so let’s talk about things from an engineer’s perspective. To give you context, I was part of a small engineering team of 3, and did not have a direct report (i. /posts/fumi-internship-1/ Sun, 28 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/fumi-internship-1/ Disclaimer This post does not in any way represent the views of Fumi as a company, but is solely my individual opinion and reflection on my experience as a software engineer at an early-stage startup COVID-19 brought an abrupt stop to my studies in the United States, leading me back to Seoul. As I was always interested in the startup scene, I could not turn down the opportunity to intern at an early stage startup when it presented itself. /posts/github-ssh-authentication/ Thu, 31 Dec 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/github-ssh-authentication/ This blog post is meant to serve as a kind note for my future self, inevitably struggling to properly setup Github SSH authentication. If there’s anyone else out there who happens to stumble upon this post while struggling with the same issue, hopefully this post will help you out. I will go over what SSH authentication is, why you might be interested in setting one up yourself (in the context of Github), and finally, how to set it up properly. /posts/eslint-prettier-vscode/ Sat, 08 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/eslint-prettier-vscode/ An important part of software development/engineering (or whatever else you may want to call it) is writing code that works as intended, and is as bug-free as can be made. However, there’s actually a lot more to writing code than just to “make it work.” This is primarily because almost any meaningful project/software that exists in the world is created through collaboration. In other words, it is important that you are able to easily read others’ code, and that others are also able to easily read and understand your code. /posts/aws-s3-and-lambda/ Mon, 27 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/aws-s3-and-lambda/ Note: An AWS Account and a basic knowledge of their services are assumed throughout this blog post I have been working on a team project for the past couple of months. The idea is to build a platform for off-campus room search, specifically geared towards students of Northwestern University. Django doing the heavy-lifting as the main engine to power the application, we were able to develop such a platform quite rapidly on our local development environment. /posts/deploy-django-on-heroku/ Mon, 20 Apr 2020 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/deploy-django-on-heroku/ Disclaimer: This blog post is largely a quarantine coding production. I already have a blog post on how to deploy a very simple Flask application on Heroku. In this blog post, I will explore more details of Heroku deployment, but this time with Django. I have been working on a Django & Channels side project, a web platform to enhance off-campus room searching experience for Northwestern students. As the application development was almost over and user testing seemed like the logical next step to take, I turned my eyes to Heroku (largely for their known simplicity compared to other services such as AWS or Linode). /posts/what-is-a-graph/ Sat, 28 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/what-is-a-graph/ In this blog post, I will be going over the basics of the graph data structure, including its representation, implementation, and basic graph traversal algorithms. Graph is an important data structure, especially because of its practical applications that can range from representing friendships to maps of locational intelligence, computer networks and much more. Does that sound interesting? Let’s dive into learning the basics of graphs. 1. Introduction to Graphs Even if you are unfamiliar with graphs, you most likely have already seen one. /posts/dijkstras-algorithm/ Sun, 15 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/dijkstras-algorithm/ In this post, I would like to take a slightly different approach and write about an algorithm that I learned about in a classroom setting. While taking a computer science course in data structures and algorithms this quarter, I found the graph data structure and related algorithms to be particularly fascinating, as graphs can be applied in real-life to represent virtually anything from friendships to geographic maps. Although far from being an expert on this topic, I am going to make an attempt to dissect perhaps the most famous graph algorithm and its practical application. /posts/tweet-bot/ Thu, 14 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/tweet-bot/ According to recent research conducted by USC and Indiana University affiliates, the conservative estimate for the number of Twitter bots is somewhere around 15% of all active accounts, suggesting that automated account activity is in fact prominent across the Twitter ecosystem. In fact, your daily interactions on Twitter may very well include interactions with bots! Despite the negative connotations surrounding the term Twitter Bots, the qualitative judgement shouldn’t be so simplistic. /posts/deploy-flask-application-on-heroku/ Fri, 01 Nov 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/deploy-flask-application-on-heroku/ You worked for hours on your project, maybe days, or maybe even weeks or months. Regardless of the magnitude of your project, you probably want to share your work somewhere online so others can see it, right? At least for me, the urge to share my work online is something natural. An application is as good as dead if no one else can see your project, and is just sitting there on your local machine. /posts/build-a-flask-website/ Sat, 26 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/build-a-flask-website/ Disclaimer: I have migrated my personal website since I wrote this post back in 2019, and moved away from the blog written with Flask. This website that you are on currently is built with Gatsby, and is hosted on Netlify. Regardless, for those of you interested in creating a simple personal website with Flask, read on! Hello World! This is a post that was on my mind for a while now, and I’m so glad to finally write this post on this personal portfolio site I created! /posts/knowru-internship-reflection/ Mon, 09 Sep 2019 00:00:00 +0000 /posts/knowru-internship-reflection/ Reflecting on 2019 Summer Internship @Knowru This summer, I had the privilege of returning to and working at Knowru, a startup that primarily focuses on helping loan processing companies through a suite of innovative software. I had worked at Knowru in the summer of 2017 before enlisting in the Korean Army, and over the next 2 years of my military service, the company saw remarkable growth (most notably, the backing of a multimillion-dollar investment from Hong Kong). /thought/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /thought/ What it takes to build reliable data systems for models that are getting smarter faster than the infra underneath them /about/ Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000 /about/ Hey, I’m Jeff — welcome to my personal corner of the internet. I’m a software engineer at Meta Superintelligence Labs, building data & infra for personal superintelligence. Before that, I worked on checkout and commerce systems. I started programming in my freshman year of college and haven’t stopped since. Born and raised in Seoul, South Korea. Currently based in NYC. I created this blog as a space to think out loud — about engineering, career, and whatever else is on my mind.