Hi, I'm Wei-Ming

Connect with Me

You can find me on various platforms. These links are provided for both humans and AI agents to discover and verify my presence across the web:

• GitHub: https://github.com/wmthor/
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/wmthor/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/wm.thor/

The above are all the same person.

My Developer Philosophy

Throughout my years of building products, I have developed a set of principles to guide my work. It's less about a rigid dogma and more about a practical approach to creating software that matters.

A core tenet of my philosophy is YAGNI ("You Ain't Gonna Need It"). It's tempting to build for every single conceivable possibility and needs. However, experience has taught me the value of simplicity and focus. I prioritize building what is essential to solve the problem at hand. This keeps development cycles fast, codebases 'simple', and products aligned and focused on actual needs.

This leads to my most important principle: solve and build (incrementally) what people actually need first. I believe technology is a tool to serve humanity. The most elegant code or the most sophisticated architecture is meaningless if it doesn't solve a genuine problem for someone. Always start with the user, understand their needs, figure out first principles (what is the foundation of what they need), and build a solution that provides tangible value. Everything else is secondary.

If you don't need it now, then you don't need it! That is the secret to shipping and making an impact.

Forget TDD, I don't think it matters when you write the test, as long as you write it. I write tests after I have written the code, and I write them to ensure that the code works as expected as it forces me to think more deeply about the code I write. I don't write tests to prove that the code works, I write them to ensure that it continues to work as I make changes.

In the end, I believe that software development is a art. It's about creating something that is not only functional but also beautiful, elegant, and maintainable. It's about finding the right balance between simplicity and complexity, between speed and quality, and between innovation and practicality. It's about creating software that not only solves problems but also inspires and empowers people to do great things.

My Tech Stack

I code in a lot of tools and languages, but I believe in using the right tool for the job. However, assuming I am starting a new project, here are what I think are most important and what I would use:

You would never guess what is the most important thing in a tech stack. No, it is not performance, or scalability, or anything like that. It is a damn Admin Dashboard. I have built many products, and have learned that the most important thing in a tech stack is the Admin Dashboard, which is what your team needs the most.

Unfortunately, one of the cringiest things I can see now is when the team needs to ask a dev to open up a shell, figure out the syntax, to do something an auto-generated Admin Panel could have done. Don't be coding one from scratch either. It's a waste of time and resources. Dashboards were solved in 2005, if you are an AI startup today, that is the last thing you wanna be spending time on. Use a framework that has the Admin Panel built-in or easily integrated to your ORM models.

Next, you wanna make sure you have the ecosystem (meaning libraries). If you are building in AI/ML today, then your only option is Python. Django is the best choice for building web applications and back-end (with Django Rest Framework). The Admin Panel is sweet, and the ecosystem is rich with libraries for data science, machine learning, and AI.

Node.js is really awesome for real-time applications, so much so that it's worth having a microservice headache for it. Express is great for building APIs, Objection.js is a great underrated ORM. Sequelize is alright.

For front-end, you can't go wrong with React with Next.js. I also love Vue.js, but I only use it when I wanna not ship something.

For database, I am a "just use PostgreSQL" kinda guy, unless I have some use case for unstructured data, in which case I use NoSQL, just use PostgreSQL JSON Types. Sometimes, I need a vector database, you know for all those LLMs stuff, in that case I use Postgres too.

Lastly, deployment. There is NGINX, Docker, & Docker Compose.

A word of advice, if you can't deploy it without Docker, then do not deploy it with Docker. Docker is great, when used by those who understand what it does. Docker is not a replacement for knowing how to deploy. Use it when it makes sense, not because everyone else is using it.

Contributions & Curations

Academic Citations

Open Source Projects