About me

Hi! I’m Jon, a senior full-stack product engineer based in Viet Nam.

I have more than 10 years of experience shipping web and mobile software. For the past nine years, I have helped build and maintain Memex across browser extensions, React Native, web apps, Node, Firebase, Cloudflare, and PostgreSQL/Supabase. I am currently open to remote senior product-engineering work, with part-time preferred and full-time also possible.

Video games brought me towards computers when I was young. I liked tinkering and figuring how to change software, like games, to suit my own tastes. I starting mainly messing around with configs for games like DOOM 3 and Morrowind. Once I discovered modding communities online, it became a full time obsession. When I grew up I learnt how to write my own software, which is one of the main things I still do now.

Memex is one of the main pieces of software I have helped bring into the world. It is a tool for people and AI agents who love learning on the Internet, with powerful ways to organize, search, annotate, and collaborate on online research. I am one of two primary contributors to its current codebase and have authored more than 900 commits across its many product surfaces.

I like nerding out about lower-level software and how things work closer to the hardware level. Unfortunately I don't get to do much of this in the web-software world, but I'd like to get back there as it was much more compelling. I discovered this passion through, old game system emulators, The C Programming Language (K&R book), and learning MIPS assembly in uni.

Outside of computers I've been gotten a lot of enjoyment out of learning human languages. The main ones I've made progress in throughout the last few years have been Indonesian and Vietnamese. They're forever journeys that I struggle with everyday, though I've made enough progress with both that I can have conversations with most people and (mostly) express what I want to say. Vietnamese was crazy hard, though I've made more progress with that as I live there and have invested more time into it. Mandarin Chinese is another language that I made a nice amount of progress in, studying it in uni in Australia and Taiwan, however I've let stagnate over the years. I'd like to get back into it (much like lower level programming!).

A bunch of my other interests:

• Ways to improve communication between people (and even other animals!)
• Ways to live more self-sufficiently, being able to decouple from greater global society.
• Ways to use our time more efficiently. I'm not crazy about the idea of being "busy" all the time, but it is cool when I learn a new trick to save time.
• How to deal with all the noise from internal inputs. e.g. thoughts, emotions, feelings, etc.
• How to "quantify" the value experiences bring and make better choices in regard to them.
• How to better participate in the greater economy, and balancing that participation with my own interests that are often not aligned.
• How to harness my attention in more ways to benefit myself and others.
• How the world works in general. I'm constantly figuring out new parts of it.

On this site you'll find a mix of experiments and mini-projects and my CV. I also maintain my personal Kindle highlights, a growing archive of passages I thought were interesting in books I read over the years.