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Garden of Spring

Vincent Lee

My name is Vincent Lee. I’m a Chinese American originally from Austin, Texas and currently living in Seattle, Washington.

I work as a software engineer, but spend most of my time outside of work on the following interests:

  • Playing the Western flute
  • Playing the Chinese flute (dizi 笛子)
  • Reading books
  • Going out and taking walks in parks (Seattle weather permitting)
  • Reading about world cultures and history
  • Listening to music and playing games
  • Writing blog posts
  • Drawing

williewillus

If you know me from the internet, you probably know me by the nick williewillus. I’d prefer if you kept calling me that (or “willie”), it’s extremely awkward when internet friends use my real name. It’s a nick I’ve been using for about 10 years now, and you can read about how I chose it below.

CV

Education

I studied Computer Science at the University of Texas at Austin, and graduated in 2020 with a B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science.

Employment

  • I currently work at Meta. Current and prior work includes:
    • Designing safe frameworks and fixing existing frameworks to have secure-by-default options, freeing product engineers from having to worry about security.
    • Rolling out broad protections across all sites including restriction of Browser Permission Policies and removal of CSP script-src unsafe-inline.
    • Carrying out much-needed refactoring and fixing in core request handling frameworks that serve trillions of requests per day.
    • Supporting the infrastructure for static taint analysis tools that discover and prevent hundreds of bugs a year from entering the codebase.
  • If you think I might be interested in working for you, please email vincent at (this website’s domain). Pointless or repetitive spamming will lead to an immediate block. Some notes:
    • NO positions related to cryptocurrency, NFTs, weapons/“defense”, or insurance claims. If you send me something like this, I’m going to block you immediately.
    • The position must be located in Seattle, WA or Bellevue, WA, or allow remote work.
    • Your organization should trust engineers with relative independence to do their best work. No micromanaging please. In other words, you have a bottoms-up engineer-driven culture.
    • I pride myself on being a generalist. Although much of my existing work has been in the security area, I’m open to learning about new areas and am confident I can quickly familiarize myself with new domain areas and technologies.
  • In the past, I have also interned at Blackbaud, Indeed, and Facebook.

Projects

R16

R16 is a bot written in the Racket programming language which allows for community-driven interactive code evaluation. It was presented at Racketfest Amateur Night 2021 (link).

Minecraft Modding

  • I was the primary maintainer of the famous Botania mod, usually performing maintenance and bugfixing, as well porting the mod to newer versions of Minecraft. I have ported the mod from 1.7.x to all versions up to 1.20.1. I also maintained its dependency mod Patchouli.
  • I was part of TeamTwilight, maintainers of the famous Twilight Forest mod for Minecraft 1.11 and above.
  • I was the primary maintainer of the Minecraft mod ProjectE from 1.8 through the 1.14 port. The mod is now maintained in later versions by pupnewfster.

Origin of the name ‘williewillus’

Not a particularly interesting story, but I’ll tell it nonetheless. It was 2006, I was about 9, and we were taking a family trip to SeaWorld. Before leaving, I acquired a little gray dolphin plushie/doll, which my siblings and I promptly named ‘Willie’. He was part of the 4-throne royalty of Dolphin World, yet he was different: quirky and intelligent. He had a sharp mind that never ceased to question anything. The ‘Willus’ is a special kind of dolphin that occurs every 13-14 generations or so within the royal line, and Willie happened to be the one. From then on, I have taken on the web name “williewillus” as a tribute to that little gray doll, as well as a reminder to myself to always question the why in everything, to never stop being different, to not fear being quirky, and to pursue intelligence on a higher level.

About the site name

“Garden of Spring” is pretty generic, but the story is interesting. In Touhou Elegant Impermanence of Sakura, one of my favorite Touhou fangames, the Stage 5 title is 「夢醒仙 山滿庭春」, meaning “Awakening in an enchanted mountain to a garden of spring”. “Garden” here is figurative and simply means that all of one’s environment is filled with spring. That stage also has one of my favorite fanmade Touhou themes, and the game overall has one of my favorite themes from a fangame, so I decided to take a shortened version of it as my site’s name.

Proudest Achievements

As our lives go on, our proudest achievements will always fade in light of newer, better accomplishments. However, I love to reflect on past and the journey to the present. So here lie my proudest accomplishments from the past. Constantly updated, never cleared. Most recent at the top.

Click to expand
  • Starting to learn the Chinese flute aka dizi (2023)
  • Getting quickly promoted at work to midlevel and senior level (2021 and 2022)
  • Graduating from UT Austin with a BS and MS, with a 4.0 final semester (Spring 2020)
  • Being extended a full-time offer for Facebook in 2020 (Summer 2019)
  • Getting accepted into the UT 5-year MS program (Fall 2018)
  • Achieving my first Touhou ExNNN (Summer 2018)
  • Joining the amazing people at Facebook and working with them for a summer (Summer 2018)
  • Achieving a 4.0 (perfect) semester (Fall 2017)
  • Joining the amazing people at Indeed and working with them for a summer (Summer 2017)
  • Getting an A in the much-feared Operating Systems Honors class
  • Joining the amazing people at Blackbaud and working with them for a summer (Summer 2016)
  • Becoming the de facto caretaker of the amazing Botania mod
  • Surviving my first semester of college u.u
  • Winning the Austin Flute Society / Austin Flute Club Young Artist Competition – Senior Division (Spring 2015)
  • Joining the ProjectE development team (Spring 2015)
  • Winning the John Philip Sousa Award, aka the official version of a “biggest band nerd” award (Spring 2015)
  • Getting a major pull request (DMPedestal) pulled into ProjectE (Spring 2015)
  • Getting a minor pull request (bucket amulets / automation) pulled into ProjectE (Spring 2015)
  • Performing with the Vista Ridge Wind Ensemble at the 2014 Midwest International Band and Orchestra Clinic (Winter 2014-2015)
  • Being accepted into the UT Turing Scholars Honors Program (Fall 2014)
  • Getting a minor pull request (XPFix / ChatOpacityFix) pulled into MinecraftForge (Fall 2014)
  • Being the principal flutist of the Austin Youth Symphony in the spring seasons of 2014 and 2015
  • Achieving Principal Flutist (1st chair) in the Region 26 Orchestra of 2013 and Assistant Principal (2nd chair) in 2014
  • Helping the Vista Ridge Marching Band earn a BOA San Antonio finalist spot for the first time (Fall 2014)
  • Achieving 5th place in the UIL Computer Science written test (Spring 2013-2014)
  • Creating and releasing BugfixMod (Winter 2013-2014)
  • Helping the Vista Ridge Marching Band earn a 2013 UIL 4A Bronze Medal in marching (Fall 2013)

Site Information

  • This website is hosted on an OpenBSD Vultr instance, running the built-in OpenBSD httpd web server
  • The website itself is statically generated using the Hugo static site generator. The hit counter is powered by a basic PHP script.
  • The favicon was made by Alwinfy.
  • The hit counter gifs are nebulously sourced from the internet. I got them from Moe-Counter.
  • This website’s original content is copyright Vincent Lee, and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-NC-SA) license.
  • This website’s theme is a fork of Anubis. Its static resources (CSS and JS) are used under the MIT license:
The MIT License (MIT)

Copyright (c) 2020 Dmitry Kolosov

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of
this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in
the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of
the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so,
subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
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THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
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https://www.vincent-lee.net/about_me/ Vincent Lee