About me

I have worked in software since graduating in 2013, from Silicon Valley to Seattle and from Amazon to Microsoft, across a wide range of projects.

The longest and most formative of those years were the nine I spent at Microsoft Azure, helping build its deployment system, a very large distributed system. That is also where I grew from software engineer to tech lead.

In 2023 I relocated from Seattle to Japan, stayed with Azure for two more years, and then joined my current company, where I work as a tech lead designing and building new systems.

Since late 2025, AI has fundamentally changed how I work. I started out skeptical and anxious: was it worth giving up habits built over many years, and could a veteran engineer keep up? The transition proved easier than I expected. Driving four or five projects in parallel with AI is far more demanding than my old way of working, but the output is beyond anything I once imagined.

I also see a widening gap, both inside and outside engineering, between people who make full use of AI, people who use it for small tasks, and people who only chat with it. I want to help close that gap, in the spirit of my former employer Microsoft's mission: empower everyone to achieve more.

If you'd like to talk, write to hi@halcight.dev.