# About Me The story of how I got into software — late-starter Python on an Android phone, dual EE/CompE at Drexel, C# career, then Go and now AI. Software engineer working in Go, C#, TypeScript, and LLMs. - Canonical: https://markhuang.ai/about - Language: en --- ## Introduction People say AI is supposed to give them their time back. For me it's been the opposite. I sleep less. I wake up earlier. The first thing in my head most mornings is some idea I left half-finished the night before. This page is the long way of explaining how I got from typing Python into an Android phone to spending my mornings like that. - **Current:** AI systems + tools - **Core stack:** Go / TypeScript / LLMs - **Mode:** Architect + builder --- ## My Journey ### High School: The Late Start ![Stylized illustration of Mark coding on a phone at a bedroom desk at night.](https://cdn.markhuang.ai/images/about-journey/high-school-python.webp) I call it a late start by today's standards, where ten and eleven year olds are out here writing real applications. Back then in my high school class, I was actually one of the only people doing it at all. I made it work with what I had: an Android phone, Python typed out one finger at a time, the keyboard autocomplete fighting me every other character. It was slow and a little ridiculous. But it was mine, and I kept opening it. ### 2012: Crossing Over ![Stylized illustration of Mark standing with luggage in a quiet airport at night.](https://cdn.markhuang.ai/images/about-journey/crossing-over.webp) Coming to the U.S. in 2012 was a whole new chapter. No relatives waiting on this side, no safety net, just me figuring out the next thing every day. The familiar piece in all of that was the Python habit on the phone. Picking it back up after the move was easily the easiest part of the whole transition. ### 2013–2018: Two Degrees, Stacked ![Stylized illustration of Mark working with circuits and a laptop in an engineering lab.](https://cdn.markhuang.ai/images/about-journey/drexel-engineering.webp) Two bachelor's degrees stacked on top of each other at Drexel: Electrical Engineering, and Computer Engineering. EE for the why-does-this-circuit-actually-work side. Computer Engineering for the how-do-you-make-it-do-something-useful side. I never picked which one mattered to me more, so I did both and built projects in the overlap. ### Co-op Years: Three Different Lives ![Stylized illustration of Mark moving between game, data, and internal-tool workstations.](https://cdn.markhuang.ai/images/about-journey/coop-years.webp) Drexel's co-op program threw me into three completely different jobs. One was Unity, building small games and finally seeing what it feels like to ship something interactive. One was Python, sitting with enterprise data and turning spreadsheets into answers nobody had asked for in the format nobody wanted. The third was .NET (Framework first, then .NET Core), writing internal tools that no one outside the company would ever see. Three jobs in eighteen months. I left each one already curious about what the next one was going to feel like. ### Early Career: The C# Years ![Stylized illustration of Mark pointing at a C sharp inspired full-stack system with deployment layers.](https://cdn.markhuang.ai/images/about-journey/csharp-years.webp) By the end of college and into my first real job, I was writing C# all day, in domains that had nothing to do with each other. I worked full-stack the whole time: frontend, backend, the CI/CD pipeline, the production environment, all of it. Owning every layer of my own projects taught me a lot, and after a few years of that I was honestly an expert in the .NET stack. That was actually the problem. The work started to feel routine because I already knew how each new project was going to shape up. New domain, same instincts. I was getting better at .NET without learning much I hadn't already seen. ### The Pivot: Finding Go ![Stylized illustration of Mark and a gopher-like guide leaving clutter for a cleaner connected system path.](https://cdn.markhuang.ai/images/about-journey/finding-go.webp) I went looking for something less comfortable, and ended up in Go. Smaller language, weirder community, fewer training wheels. I never really went back. The part that actually stuck wasn't the language itself. It was a small lesson I keep using since: when something stops stretching me, I leave it sooner than I used to. ### 2023–2025: Half Architect, Half Builder ![Stylized illustration of Mark turning a cracked legacy block into glowing microservice blocks.](https://cdn.markhuang.ai/images/about-journey/architect-builder.webp) This is where Go went from a side curiosity to the actual tool I worked in every day. From 2023 through 2025 I was a solution and development architect on a project to modernize a 20+ year old website into a microservices system. About half of the work was architect-side: designing how the Go APIs fit together, planning infrastructure, networking, security. The other half was sleeves rolled up, actually building what I'd designed. It was the first time my day job pushed me as hard as my side projects did. ### July 2025: Buried in AI ![Stylized illustration of Mark smiling at an early-morning desk surrounded by AI robot agents and idea threads.](https://cdn.markhuang.ai/images/about-journey/buried-in-ai.webp) Then AI happened. People keep telling me that AI gives them their time back. UNFORTUNATELY, that has not been my experience. Two subscriptions later (OpenAI and Anthropic, in case you're keeping score), I just learn faster, which means I have more things I want to try, which means I sleep less, which means I wake up earlier, which means I turn on my PC and immediately start poking at whatever idea I abandoned the night before. I am, as it turns out, a nerd. :P ### May 2026: A New Door Opens ![Certificate-inspired illustration of a credential opening into future AI architecture paths.](https://cdn.markhuang.ai/images/about-journey/claude-certified-architect-future.webp) Getting the Claude Certified Architect Foundations certificate on May 18, 2026 was exciting because it did not feel like an ending. It felt like a door opening. The AI work I had been chasing suddenly had a wider map: architecture, agents, context, tools, safety, and future systems I have not built yet. I am going to keep learning, because this feels like another starting line. --- ## On Learning and AI Learning is what makes any of this fun for me. Most of the conversation about AI right now is about how it changes work. I think the bigger story is how it changes learning. We used to spend hours on YouTube figuring out how to install or set up some thing. Now you can just ask, and a model walks you through it before the docs page even loads. That doesn't mean depth stopped mattering. If you actually want to push something forward, like real research or frontier work, you still need the slow painful kind of basics. But if you just want to use a tool to get something done faster, you don't need to be the person who built it. Match the depth to what you actually want out of it. Both are fine. They're just different jobs. What I keep coming back to is that we're not bystanders in this. We get to decide what we want out of these tools and steer them that way. I'm an optimist about most of it, even when I probably shouldn't be. I'm having a good time poking around in what feels like an ocean of stuff to learn, and I'd rather drag friends in with me than wait until I've figured out where the current goes. If you read this far, pull up a board. > Cars are great. They get you somewhere with less time and less energy. They also kill people every day. AI is going to be the same kind of thing. The honest move isn't to refuse to drive. It's to actually pay attention while we do. --- ## Tech Stack - Go (language, expert) - C# (language, expert) - TypeScript (language, advanced) - Python (language, intermediate) - SQL (language, advanced) - Next.js (framework, advanced) - React (framework, advanced) - Vue.js (framework, advanced) - .NET (framework, expert) - Chi (Go) (framework, expert) - GORM (framework, advanced) - Kubernetes (infrastructure, advanced) - Docker (infrastructure, advanced) - Redis (infrastructure, advanced) - PostgreSQL (database, advanced) - SQL Server (database, expert) - GitHub Actions (tool, advanced) --- ## Education & Certifications ### Drexel University Bachelor of Science (Dual Degree), Electrical Engineering and Computer Engineering (2013–2018) ### Certifications - Claude Certified Architect Foundations, Anthropic (2026) - Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD), Microsoft (2019) - Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate (MCSA), Microsoft (2018) - Microsoft Certified Professional (MCP), Microsoft (2017) --- ## Interests ### 🤖 AI & Machine Learning Exploring LLMs, fine-tuning, and building AI-powered developer tools. Particularly interested in inference efficiency and agentic systems. ### 🏍️ Motorcycles A 2025 CBR650R Owner, was planning to use it for commuting but now mostly a casual rider to gym. ### 🔬 Discovering New Technology Always exploring emerging tools, frameworks, and platforms. I share my learning experiences hoping my mistakes help others — and I love learning from others' mistakes too. ### 📚 Reading Technical books, science fiction, and history. Favorites: The Pragmatic Programmer, Dune, Sapiens.