About

About

Two things worth knowing. Pick a door.

01 About Me Engineer, mathematician, composer. The human behind the site. enter 02 About the Website How this thing is built — the stack, the type, the color, and the machinery hiding behind the posts. read it

About Me

5 min read AI
Candid photo of Jack Li
Slightly less posed than the homepage portrait.

Hey there, I’m Jack! I’m a 20y/o Chinese-American rocking in and around SF and Berkeley.

The short version: I’m a software engineer by trade, a mathematician by training and temperament, and a composer strictly by hobby. The ordering is by employability; don’t read too much into it.

At the moment, I’m just building things I like and cosplaying the average SF Bay Area tech bro on a daily basis.

What I’m doing now

As of August 2026.

  • Building stuff I like, none of it shippable yet.
  • Running a long-loop computational search for a Hadamard matrix of order 668 — mostly for fun; Legendre pair exclusions fell out of it as a byproduct.
  • Occasionally grinding away at Hogpatch.

How I got here

Map of China with Fujian province highlighted and a red dot at Quanzhou
泉州 Quanzhou — the dot on the coast of 福建 Fujian.

I was born in 泉州 (Quanzhou) in China; my family’s hometown is 江平镇 (Jiangpingzhen), less than an hour from the Vietnamese border. My parents and I immigrated to the US in 2009, just before I turned three. I grew up in San Jose until I was 18, when we moved out to Tracy in the Central Valley; these days I orbit SF and Berkeley.

Map of China with Guangxi highlighted and a red dot at Jiangping on the Vietnamese border
江平镇 Jiangpingzhen — the dot at the southern tip of 广西 Guangxi, right on the Vietnamese border.

I had a short stint as a math major at UC Berkeley, then dropped out to build at a startup. That’s the whole story — it’s less dramatic than it sounds.

My passport says Jiaquan Li — 李家全, if you’d like to pronounce it properly in the dialect of your choosing; the English spelling is just the Mandarin transliteration with the tones sanded off. I go by Jack because it’s easier to say and it’s what I grew up answering to.

I write orchestral music

Chronologically, music came first: I played clarinet from age 8 to 18, most of my formative years, before quitting band.

Composing arrived during COVID, mostly out of boredom. Notably, the genesis was the main theme of Hearts of Iron 4. Hearing it made me realize “Hey I can do this too!” and thus began a 4 year long journey, ending in a hiatus due to college.

I would write orchestral music in the general direction of the Romantic era with sprinkles of modernity. My poles are a mix of Mahler, Shostakovich, and Sibelius — yes, that’s literally the three axes of 20th-century classical music.

If you listen to one thing, make it Dance, the piece I’m most proud of:

There is also an unfinished symphony, three movements done out of four; and I haven’t touched it since 2024 due to getting busy with school and now work. I’ll get back to it when the time and energy return — the fourth movement knows I owe it.

The rest lives at works.

Mathematics, humbly

Commutative diagram from the proof of the Yoneda lemma
One of those funky diagrams; this one’s from the proof of the Yoneda lemma.

My first real contact with abstract mathematics was category theory, taught to me sideways by a functional-programmer friend who had built his startup’s entire stack in Haskell (including, I must stress, a video codec from scratch) and kept drawing weird graphs of letters and arrows. Those turned out to be commutative diagrams, and from there he explained category theory to me and that’s where I fell in love with abstract math. Thinking of it now, “I got into math through being introduced into category theory by a functional programmer” is one hell of a thing to say.

As of right now, I’ve finished the standard undergraduate curriculum in mathematics (sans complex analysis), plus a few graduate courses: abstract algebra, differential topology, and two-thirds of a complexity theory class. Even after dropping out, I still keep my brain alive and healthy by doing a bit of math every day outside of vibecoding. Currently, I’m in the process of going through the canonical category theory textbook: MacLane’s Category Theory for the Working Mathematician, as well as some ML applied math on the side.

Vices & tastes

One rather degenerate interest of mine is poker — no-limit hold’em cash only, live low stakes; the highest I’ve played is 5/5. You may find me at the “tech bro poker nights” around SF and the occasional home game in Berkeley.

As for video games, I’ve been a Counter-Strike enjoyer for as long as I can remember (I’ve even played the oft-forgotten Condition Zero campaign!) and lately I’ve been grinding on FaceIt, mostly due to the cheater situation on official Valve matchmaking (Valve pls fix). The rest of the rotation: Hearts of Iron 4 (favorite mods: The Fire Rises, Equestria at War, Road to 56), Hell Let Loose, Forts, and most recently Arma 3 and Reforger.

I’m also a menswear enthusiast: I will notice what you’re wearing, say nothing, and silently critique it 🕵.

Aspiring foodie; check back on this one.

Listening: Classical, Jazz, J-pop, R-pop, EDM, shitposts. Favorite composers — see the three axes above.

For the machines I use and what I carry every day, see Uses.

Get in Touch

You can find me on GitHub, LinkedIn, or reach out via email:

li [dot] jack [dot] services [at] gmail [dot] com

Image credits