about.md

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post	About	/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 quite a few years before relocating in 2018.

As for my name Xiaofeng - it's pronounced very similar to SHAW-phone▷{:target="_blank"}. 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:
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{:target="_blank"}. 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{:target="_blank"} 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{:target="_blank"}.

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!