Who am I


Charles .

I am a Plumbing Lead at Snowflake building and unclogging the things that run things. Previously, I worked at Cruise developing multi-tenant container platforms with self-driving Kubernetes and at Google Cloud building the (almost) production-ready service mesh Istio.

While working at Snowflake, I studied Management Science on the Stanford Farm. Before moving to the Bay Area to pay so much in rent for so little, I was an undergrad at Duke studying CS, EE, and Finance. I would be a totally different person had I not met my rock star research advisor Prof. Jeff Chase. He taught me to make the investment early that pays dividends in the future. He exhorted me to be serious and sincere about life and work—not to fight a fake war or someone else's war but to strive for what matters to the living or the dead. He is also probably the only person who has read my thesis cover to cover.

I have been writing on this blog since 2016. My interests are Distributed Systems, Startups, and Career Development, but this blog engages a wider audience. It stands as a living record of my growth and struggles, triumphs and lessons in my work and life. I hope you find them useful, too.

I am always excited to hear from folks. Drop a note!