I build things — mostly software, and over the years, a handful of startups.
I'm happiest taking an idea from an empty repo to something real people use. Co-founding and building startups taught me that the hard part is rarely the code — it's building the right thing. That lesson stuck: these days, alongside shipping software, I spend a lot of my time coaching engineers to think like product people, not just ticket-takers.
I have a particular soft spot for open source that helps Taiwanese developers ship better user experiences — small, focused libraries for the fiddly local problems (ZIP codes, ID validation, locale-aware pickers) that every Taiwan-facing product runs into. If I can save another developer an afternoon of yak-shaving, that's a good day.
These days I write mostly TypeScript, but I came up on Java and Ruby and I'm still right at home in both. On the engineering side I care about the unglamorous plumbing that makes products trustworthy at scale — multi-tenant systems, access control, real-time data — and lately I've been tinkering on the Cloudflare stack (Workers, D1) for fun.
I'm based in Southern California, where you'll usually find me at a baseball game when I'm away from the keyboard.
| Project | What it is |
|---|---|
| use-tw-zipcode | React Hook for Taiwan city / district selection, with ZIP code lookup |
| taiwan-validator | Validators for Taiwan IDs, business numbers, and license plates |
| use-country-list-zh | React Hook for a Chinese-language country picker with fast filtering |
| use-wg | Convert Chinese characters to Wade–Giles romanization |
| ts-package-starter | The TypeScript starter template I use to ship these as npm packages |
- 🔭 Currently building small developer tools and helping engineers grow a product mindset
- 🌱 Learning my way around the Cloudflare stack (Workers, D1) for side projects
- 👯 Happy to collaborate on open source that makes life easier for Taiwan-facing products
- 💬 Ask me about taking products 0-to-1, startups, or why the hard part is never the code
- ⚡ Fun fact — my little Taiwan-locale libraries quietly run inside more apps than I'll ever know about
My master's research was in natural language processing. I've long since moved on from NLP, but it left me with a soft spot for data and a habit of thinking in systems.
- 🌐 laigary.com
- 𝕏 @imgarylai