hi, i’m alan!
I’m a software engineer at Microsoft, working on OS power management. I graduated from MIT with my SB in computer science and writing in June 2023, and my MEng in computer science in September 2024. I like problems relating to computer architecture and systems; my MEng thesis focused on hardware acceleration for FPGA routing.
I also do a lot of other things! I write poetry, plays, essays, and blog posts, among other things, and I have been described on an occasion or two as “multihyphenate”, a term I wield with both pride and a mild horror.
what’s here?
The most well-maintained page on this site is the MIT page, which forms a comprehensive breakdown of all the things I did during my time at MIT. The life page aims to achieve a similar purpose, but obviously has a much broader scope. The archive page contains the archives of my first personal blog.
why the title?
“Actions, not words” is a mantra I adopted from a description of Chinese culture found on the wikipedia page for the Pixar short, Bao. The text has not been there since June 2021, but I think the sentiment behind it remains strong for me. I chose this title for my personal website (then a blog) in March of 2020, as a reminder to myself that I needed to do things that actually mattered to people, rather than just talk about doing them. Of course, there is a certain irony to telling a writer to focus on “actions, not words,” but I think that is part of the reason the name has stuck.