Hao Lian. Programmer. Sorcerer. Handsome.

Education.

Undergraduate Class of 2011: Princeton University.

Pursuing a Bachelor of Science in Engineering in Computer Science in the three-year Advanced Standing program.

Hopefully marketable skills.

C, Python, Objective-C, C#, JavaScript, PHP, Java, MATLAB, Perl, Ruby, SQL, Spanish, Assembly, and C++. And others: all things WSGI, Cocoa (iOS and OS X), ASP.NET MVC, Django, Pylons, WordPress, Emacs, how to never write code without documentation and testing, LaTeΧ, HTML, how to make a good tomato sauce, and CSS.

Experience.

Summer 2010: Fog Creek Software.

ASP.NET MVC, Python, Mercurial API, JavaScript, jQuery.

Worked as a software engineering intern on the Kiln team, implementing features and fixing bugs for the 2.0 beta release. Worked on a team of 10–20 on a mature code base. Met a hard deadline of a summer beta release while taking on code ownership of repository aliases, read/write API, and client tools. Learned valuable team-player skills, this being the first time I’ve worked with so many (talented, attractive) people. Toward the end, I also began writing newsletters promoting the new FogBugz and Kiln releases, mixing humor with computer science and Old Spice deodorant.

Summer 2009: Google Summer of Code.

Python.

Part-time contracting. Worked under the Python Software Foundation porting Crunchy to Python 3. Acquired an expertise in transitioning libraries from Python 2 and Python 3 using 2to3, unit testing, and functional testing. Worked independently to meet expectations and deadlines; solicited and incorporated feedback during code reviews from lead developer André Roberge. Got more than his share of Unicode encoding and decoding errors.

Summer 2009: Stanford University.

Python, Pylons, SQLAlchemy.

Part-time contracting. Worked under Stanford project manager Dr. Jorge Phillips to create a Pylons web application to present existing data and API layers to users in the Neurological Imaging Management System. Worked in a team to deliver the application with extensive documentation and tests. Ensured everybody remained in the loop despite working separately from the group through strong communication skills.

2008 to present: Princeton Undergraduate Student Government’s IT Committee.

Drupal, Joomla, PHP, Python, Django.

Worked to maintain and sometimes create web applications on behalf of a hodge-podge of campus student groups. Juggled deadlines with schoolwork and heavily communicated with an assortment of people in order to collaboratively realize people’s ideas and visions on the internet. During this time, I was also the system administrator for web servers hosting all the various applications, old and new.

Summer 2008: Summer Institute for Training in Biostatistics at North Carolina State University.

SAS, R, Super Smash Bros.

I spent two months in this biostatistics introduction course sponsored by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute learning a basic overview of biostatistics: mathematics, ethics, and other aspects of the clinical trial process. Working on a team, my final course project involved the analysis of data from the 1998 PURSUIT eptifibatide clinical trial.

2006 to present: Volunteer tutoring.

I am always involved in volunteer after-school tutoring at libraries. Past work include my high school library and the Princeton Public Library’s Springboard program, where students of all ages get to witness just exactly how much I should have remembered.

November 2006 to June 2009: North Carolina State University’s Genetic Signal Processing Group.

Perl, MATLAB, C.

Worked on a team of three with fellow high-schoolers to research translational efficiency in E. coli K-12, writing a computational toolbox as the end result. The resulting paper and presentation, which distilled the research into an accessible and thoroughly-rehearsed 12-minute talk, won second-place at the prestigious 2008 National Siemens Competition. As a team, we got our first taste of research work, performed without a definite goal or answer.