About

A short version of who I am and what I spend my time on.

I've been writing software professionally for about eight years. I started out doing web backends — the usual mix of REST APIs, queues, and databases — and slowly drifted toward the infrastructure side: deployment, observability, and keeping the lights on. These days I'm happiest when a system is small enough to fit in my head.

What I work with

Day to day I write mostly Go, with Python for glue and one-off scripts. I'm comfortable across the Linux userland, spend a lot of time in systemd and nginx/Caddy config, and lean on PostgreSQL for anything that needs to persist. I try to keep dependencies few and understood.

How I think about software

I have a strong bias toward simplicity. A service that does one thing, logs clearly, and fails loudly is worth more to me than a clever one I can't debug at 3am. I'd rather read the source than the wiki, and I'd rather delete code than add it.

The best feature I ever shipped was a thousand lines I managed to remove.

Outside work

I read widely — history and the occasional novel — walk most evenings, and tinker with a small rack of secondhand hardware at home. This site runs on a modest VPS, which is partly the subject of some of the writing here.

Say hello

Email is best: hello@jiahaolong.top. I'm always happy to talk about infrastructure, Go, or how to make an old machine useful again.