About me

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Born in Jiading, a suburb of Shanghai. I was brought up in a small village where my father grew up. I really enjoyed my childhood in the wild with my fellows. I spent most of my early life there, it is now within 5km radius of the internaltional F1 circuit (all my childhood memory is gone).

In the 1990's, our family moved to a small town and lived there for many years. At around 2000, due to a massive government project (the internaltional F1 circuit), our old house was demolished. Fortunately, my parents were given a piece of land and a small amount of money to rebuild the house (spent a lot more than given) near where it was. We moved to the new house in 2005 it's kind of my root in Shanghai ;-) Hopefully, it won't be knocked down again in the foreseeable future;-)

I finished my Bachelor's Degree (Computer Science) at Shanghai University.

I started messing with IT back in 1994 when I was in junior high school. I started with Microsoft DOS 6.22 (YES). I fell in love with GNU/Linux in 2001, my first distribution was Mandrake Linux 8.1 (KDE 2.2.1 as the default desktop environment). As shown below as a retail box set, I still have them ;-D I bought it from a local software distributor for 38 CNY (not cheap back then) as far as I remember. Now it has been renamed to Mandriva and seems to have faded out of the mainstream Linux distributions with the rise of Ubuntu.

Later on, I switched to Red Hat Linux 7.3 (distro hopper start point) because there were a lot more resources available on the Internet (RH specific, software packages in RPM format as well). I can still remember KDE was pretty unstable and the Chinese Language / locale (fontconfig, font rendering) support was poor at that time. That indirectly pushed me to learn English harder ;-) Looking back, this turned out to be decisive. Learning the language well (English) did help me a lot in the long run, not only as a key strength and surviving ability in the modern flat world, but also not to be stuck at Microsoft Windows platform. Open source is the real force.

I joined BEA Systems China Ltd in 2006. After working hard for almost 2 years, lucky enough I seized an opportunity to internally transfer to Australia, doing a senior role but got much better pay in A$ and lifestyle. Australia is famous for its beautiful beaches, unique Kangaroos and Koalas all sort of natural resources, most important - its freedom, generosity and democracy. It's always good for me to learn and to do something different. Now that BEA Systems has been taken over by Oracle Corporation - World's largest Enterprise Software company and 2nd largest Software company, obviously I work for the new overlord, based in Sydney. In January 2014 I started working for Citrix mainly focusing on the Xen Hypervisor and XenServer (also KVM/QEMU, LXC/Docker) and Linux (System Administration, Networking, Storage, Kernel etc...). In April 2016 I joined MuleSoft a pre-IPO company (SFO based) focusing on integration / API and iPaaS (which IPOed in March 2017) as Cloud Solutions Architect (AWS, networking, storage, infrastructure, security). MuleSoft went IPO in March 2017 as NYSE:MULE personally I didn't expect that to happen that quickly. Anyway, it was a once in a lifetime experience and good memory. Moved to Services (consulting) in October 2017, in addition to the stuff that I used to work on, k8s and its surrounding technology stacks are my new focus, really love k8s (it will be as important as what Linux has become) ;-) In March 2018, MuleSoft was acquired by Salesforce.com (SFDC), hmmm, didn't expect an acquisition this fast. I've worked with SFDC people in several projects which were successful so we kind of know each other's culture and core values well. You see, Heroku is still around and they are using their own branding and email address. So far I am positive about the future, let's wait and see.

My core skill tree consists of: Linux, Virtualization, Networking, Storage, specialised in troubleshooting and performance tuning. A self-claimed Linux Ninja, infrastructure dude ;-D

In future, I would like to make the best use of what I am capable of to change/improve the way we live, make the world a little bit better place for human beings.

For more info, check skill set page: Skill Matrix

I really enjoy the lifestyle, multi-cultural & diversed society, beautiful landscape, environment, wild animals and people in Australia. People are free to talk, everyone can stand up for themselves and disagree. I really like the freedom here (it's some key elements that have been missing for the first 24 years of my life). Very different lifestyle vs. life in Shanghai. Here life is family oriented, KISS (Keep It Simple and Stupid), people are bonded with weak ties, no meaningless social. I am grateful to my managers back in BEA Systems for giving me this life-changing opportunity. 

Life is like a box of chocolate, you never know what you're going to get. We live in a changing world, work and live with changes. Well, remember: When God closes one door he opens another. Believe yourself, you can make it. Impossible is nothing.

Not sure what to write in detail, probably I will finish this page when I have time. Thanks for all you guys/gals for your stay on this simple website. Cheers! Should I thank Google? Yes...