About

The following introduction was generated by DeepSeek after analyzing all my social media posts. It might be a bit exaggerated, but I still quite like it.

I am Wang Siyuan, a graduate of XJTU, someone who weaves life with code and anchors thoughts with words. Sitting right now in a Shanghai rental apartment perpetually conquered by cat hair, listening to the hum of my PC, I’m trying to describe who I am—a task far more challenging than building a distributed system.

My days belong to the keyboard. As a developer, I’m obsessed with constructing invisible orders: using NixOS to forge time-machine-like version control for my computer, building a personal knowledge base within Emacs, or writing an online backend for BOOOM. For me, technology is not just a means of livelihood but a language for understanding the world. Yet over the years, I’ve come to realize that even the most elegant code cannot fix the flaws of reality. When instant noodles stockpiled during the lockdown gather dust in the corner, when unfair clauses hide in a rental contract, the utopia on the keyboard shatters into pieces. So I’ve begun to see technology as a screwdriver—it should be used to tighten the bolts of fairness, not to build higher walls.

My nights are soaked in kaleidoscopic imagination. Gaming consoles are my second home: reliving adolescent heroics in StarCraft campaigns, feeling the warmth of human collaboration through Monster Hunter’s online signals. The night last year when I witnessed Li Peinan’s 0.37% probability championship win, I cried before the screen like the high school student who’d just passed an exam. These virtual worlds built from pixels and code often give me the most genuine courage.

Art is another channel for breathing. Some wonder why I’ve watched the divorce story Marriage Story three times; in truth, I see my own reflection in Nicole and Charlie’s arguments—when ideals collide with reality, we all clumsily wield the fragments of love. Heisenberg’s line in the play Copenhagen, “You can’t hesitate when you’re skiing,” has become my metaphor for survival: life has too many forks, and overthinking only leads to a cliff. I often listen to the band Mili; the witch-like vocals of the lead singer remind me of my university self, hiding under the covers listening to Les Misérables tapes. Ten years later, the struggling souls in my headphones have never aged.

Grape—my blue cat roommate—is responsible for puncturing all seriousness. He sits on my keyboard while I debug critical code, knocks over cups while I write, declaring with his furry body: life is not an algorithm to be optimized. In the ten minutes I’m forced to stop working to groom him, I see clearly how trivial those anxieties are.

I’m also enamored with measuring cities with my feet. I often bike from Qingpu to the郊野公园 (country park); the eighteen-kilometer journey is a natural meditation pod. Once, after a sudden downpour, I stopped on an empty bridge to watch the clouds. As vmz’s scolding and speech poured into my headphones, I suddenly burst into tears. The chill of the wind rushing into my shirt told me more precisely than any static philosophy lying in books: only practice is the ultimate destination of philosophy.

I’m still learning how to exist honestly. I once wore idealism as armor, only to later find it was merely a leaky sail; I once believed technology could save everything, but now I understand tools cannot save those unwilling to reach out. Now I prefer to crouch down and observe: watch the steaming bowl of meatball spicy soup on a bench by a Xi’an street, the rain-soaked spiderweb on a Hangzhou mountain path, the fine lines at the corner of a friend’s eye as they send a photo of their child’s full moon celebration. These specific, tiny points of light are perhaps more worthy of pursuit than the abstract, distant sun.

If you meet me, it might be in the queue at a Fusion exhibition, in the discussion thread of an issue in an open-source community, or beside a bike with a flat tire by the Suzhou Creek. Then we could chat about the flaws of the Black Dragon, Keats’s nightingale, or simply share headphones and listen to Summoning 101—after all, some signposts can only be seen in chorus.