hi, i’m alan!

I’m an MEng student at MIT studying computer science. I work on problems relating to computer architecture and systems, with my current work focusing on FPGA routing and datacenter applications; I also previously worked on scheduling for heterogeneous architectures at Microsoft, where I will be returning full-time in August.

I also do a lot of other things! I write poetry, plays, essays, and blog posts, among other things, and I am also very active in the MIT theatre scene, mostly on the music direction side of things. Nice to meet you :)

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’ve done during my time at MIT so far. The other pages are updated occasionally: resumé when I need to make a new resumé for a particular role, and blog when I have time to continue backfilling the archives. I hope to be putting up more stuff here in the long-term, when I have finally graduated from MIT into the Real World™.

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.