About

Welcome to my hypertext garden on the World Wide Web. There are many like it—but this one is mine. I’m Youwen, and I designed this website myself, by hand, following the tradition of hackers of yore.

My whereabouts are sort of all over the place recently, but you can find me in Beijing, China right now, or typically around the San Francisco Bay Area when I’m in the U.S.

Some favored pastimes include taking photos, playing guitar (poorly), video games, hacking of all sorts, and long walks along the beach.

Lately, besides hacking on random projects, my time has been mostly split between managing functor.systems, a hacker collective building cool stuff, and working on a few hardware/software projects with the MIT OpenCompute Lab.

I occasionally attend hackathons for fun. Most recently, I won the grand prize at HackMIT 2025. I’ve also won prizes at SB Hacks XI and UCSB DataOrbit.

I’m originally from Shanghai, China. My second hometown is Leiyang City (耒阳市), in Hunan Province, China—the birthplace of Cai Lun, the inventor of paper1.

After that, I lived in the state of Utah for a few years as a kid, before moving to the SF Bay Area. I attended 6 different elementary schools, 1 middle school, and 2 high schools.

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I like programming, somewhat. I hold the view of the Wizard Book2 that programming is procedural epistemology—the act of learning and understanding enough about a problem to write code to solve it. The process of writing and iterating on code itself is the valuable portion. In contrast, the final code produced to solve a problem is merely a side effect of the process of discovering enough about the problem to write it in the first place. In that sense, I despise coding, the act of translating a known problem and solution into procedures for a computer. Coding is best left to so-called code monkeys.

I’m an adherent of the nPOV of the nLab: “the observation that homotopy theory/algebraic topology, (homotopy) type theory, (higher) category theory and (higher) categorical algebra have a plethora of useful applications.”

By the way, I use NixOS. See this page to hear all about my neurotic software choices.

  1. 1Ok, you’ve got me. Per wikipedia: “Although traditionally regarded as the inventor of paper, earlier forms of paper have existed since the 3rd century BCE, so Cai’s contributions are limited to innovation, rather than invention.” But that’s not nearly as cool.
  2. 2aka the legendary Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs