About me

I'm Zhiren. When studying in Australia, Aussies tend to call me Ziren and some of my ex colleagues call me Leon. On the Internet I often use errenil, pronounced as "error nil". The pronoun is he/him.

I'm mostly interested in the following subjects (in no particular order):

• GNU/Linux (mainly Arch, Gentoo, NixOS and occasionally, Fedora)
• Emacs (along with some editor-specific things)
• (Functional) Programming Languages, Compilers, Type and Category Theory
• Blockchains (Solana, Sui) and decentralized Web3 applications
• Web technologies (Deno, Node.js, TypeScript, CSS, Standard Web APIs, Web Assembly)
• Distributed Systems and Cloud Computing (DevOps and in particular AWS)
• Free and Open Source Software (FOSS)
• Skateboard (out of practice for too long, alas)
• Learning Japanese/Korea and improving English
• Reading long in-depth reports published on The New Yorker
• Watching (some) K-Drama TV series

About this site

Previously the site was built with Hakyll. After my old domain expired, I planed to migrate my site to a new domain with a new SSG.

This time, I want to have one that lives closer to the Web ecosystem so that I can conveniently hack the DOM. Now it runs on Lume. The thing that I'm mostly satisfied with the current site is the use of vanilla CSS (no pre-, post- or whatever-CSS). I hope you find the site fast and responsive. After all, it contains only HTML and CSS, free of JavaScript¹.

You might have noticed I did not include my LinkedIn footprint here. I particularly do not like it much. It constantly implies I should pay for improved visibility; It spams me with unsolicited messages from agents I have absolutely no connection with; In its passport-issuing countries (for verification), it doesn't list China (but there is Hong Kong), so I can't even verify my account. The UI is messy and ads are almost everywhere. Exercise: try to navigate to the place where you can manage your resumes (hint: not possible on mobile). Its job-matching algorithm is of low quality: once it pushed a notification saying I'm a top applicant for Australian Federal Police (of course it wants me to pay for better accuracy). That said, I rule out LinkedIn on my site, for good.

As the migration is in process and the site is undergoing reconstruction, more will be coming.