Hey, I'm Gary 👋

I build things — mostly software, and over the years, a handful of startups.

I'm happiest taking an idea from an empty repo to something real people use. Co-founding and building startups taught me that the hard part is rarely the code — it's building the right thing. That lesson stuck: these days, alongside shipping software, I spend a lot of my time coaching engineers to think like product people, not just ticket-takers.

I have a particular soft spot for open source that helps Taiwanese developers ship better user experiences — small, focused libraries for the fiddly local problems (ZIP codes, ID validation, locale-aware pickers) that every Taiwan-facing product runs into. If I can save another developer an afternoon of yak-shaving, that's a good day.

These days I write mostly TypeScript, but I came up on Java and Ruby and I'm still right at home in both. On the engineering side I care about the unglamorous plumbing that makes products trustworthy at scale — multi-tenant systems, access control, real-time data — and lately I've been tinkering on the Cloudflare stack (Workers, D1) for fun.

I'm based in Southern California, where you'll usually find me at a baseball game when I'm away from the keyboard.

Say hi

• 💼 LinkedIn
• 𝕏 @imgarylai