About Me

Hello World! My name is Zhiming Xu (许致明). I’m a software engineer at Otter.ai. I completed my master degree at University of Virginia ^{[a backstory]}. I did my undergraduate at Department of Computer Science, Nanjing University.

Most recently, I worked on data ingestion at Lacework, once a cloud security unicorn, and bailed out after its fire sale to Fortinet ^{[another backstory]}. I was born in Xiangyang (襄阳, literally the north side of the Xiang River), a beautiful city lying by the Han River in the central part of China and lived there for most of the time before graduating from Xiangyang No.5 High School and went to college. I love travel and photography. You can see my photos in Album or my Instagram.

I’m a vocal critic of SF bay area lifestyle and climate (too dry and extreme in precipitation). I think it’s declared ideal only because there are arguably more serious problems with climates elsewhere in the U.S. (Too cold in Chicago, New York, too hot in Houston, mild but too stormy in Charlotte, Atlanta). For this reason, I’m always interested in job opportunities around the Washington DC area where I find a great resemblance to my home in its climate.

I write about my experiences in the world of tech startups on my 微信公众号

I’m also interested in collaborating on research projects, especially in building systems for large model inference. You can check out my past publications on my Google Scholar.