About

I’m Yaodong Zhao, a software engineer. I build web applications.

What keeps me interested isn’t the building itself. It’s the questions that surface along the way. Why the designers made a trade-off. What gets lost when we optimize for convenience. Whether a constraint that feels limiting is a flaw or the point.

These days I work with AI coding tools. Something else writes the code while I guide it. I’m trying to understand what that changes. I can’t always tell where my judgment ends and its suggestions begin.

That’s part of why I write here. AI can summarize solutions. It can’t capture what it felt like to find them: the dead ends, the debugging at midnight, the trade-offs made under constraints nobody else will see. I try to keep those details, even the ordinary ones. They’re what actually happened.

This blog is about software, design decisions, and sometimes a connection to something further afield. Some posts are just thinking out loud. I’m reachable on LinkedIn, GitHub, and X.