Hi, I’m William 👋

I have a deep interest in building distributed systems leveraging cutting-edge cloud technologies. Currently, I'm a software engineer focused on developing efficient and scalable services at CrowdStrike, Inc.

contact me

A little about me

wlgao@10.0.0.22 - bash

$ cd /home/wlgao

$ cat README.md

William recently graduated from University of California, Santa Cruz with a bachelor's degree in Bioinformatics and a minor in Computer Science. He excelled in coursework such as:

CSE 113 - Parallel and Concurrent Programming
CSE 130 - Principles of Computer Systems Design
STAT 206 - Applied Bayesian Statistics (graduate level)
BME 205 - Bioinformatics Models and Algorithms (graduate level)
BME 230A - Introduction to Computational Genomics and Systems Biology (graduate level)

At UC Santa Cruz, William was an undergraduate research assistant in the Computational Genomics Lab at the UCSC Genomics Institute for over two years, where he contributed to the development of a distributed workflow management system designed for genomic data analysis. This experience sparked his interest in not just utilizing platforms like AWS, GCP, and Kafka, but also learning about what it takes to build them.

William's ultimate career goal is to design and build scalable, resilient, and secure tools and services in the cloud for genomics and healthcare. He is also interested in designing effective visualization tools for large-scale datasets.

$ ls skills/

Python Golang TypeScript React MySQL Cassandra Kafka Docker Kubernetes

$ exit

Some things I've built

EaseCation Network

I co-created the Minecraft multiplayer network in 2015 with the goal of providing a fun and stable experience for Minecrafters. Our servers span 30+ physical machines serving 8,000+ peak concurrent players.

Java Netty MySQL Linux servers

WebPE.js

An implementation of the Minecraft network protocol in TypeScript. Basic functionalities, including player movement and chunk loading, are implemented through a custom-built UDP-WebSocket proxy and the Babylon.js 3D game engine.

TypeScript WebSockets Babylon.js

ochem

A web-based, interactive visualization tool for organic chemistry reactions. Chemical reactions are visualized as a directed graph. The visualization aims to display the relationships between functional groups and the synthetic routes between different compounds in an elegant way.

TypeScript React SCSS cytoscape.js