Hello, my name is Jianneng. I am currently a co-founder at Knowmatic, a tool that lets you write help center-style articles for software products by simply recording narrated screencasts.

Previously, I was a co-founder at Navvable, building modern workflow software for immigration law firms. Before that, I was a Software Engineer at Workday, where I worked on distributed systems and data processing, specifically using Apache Spark, Hadoop, as well as JVM-based languages and libraries.

I was born in Harbin, China, where I grew up and finished elementary school. Then I moved to Toronto, Canada, and stayed there until the end of high school. Next, I went to Cornell University in the east coast of US for undergrad, before coming to UC Berkeley in the west coast for master’s. It can be a bit of a struggle when people ask me where I’m from.

I used to be involved in the speedcubing scene, and competed to solve the Rubik’s cube and variants as quickly as possible. These days, while I always have a cube by my desk, I mostly play with it when waiting for code to compile. I do like to think that I had some real potential though.

Sword and Signals is my personal blog. I intend to use it to share some of my learnings and musings over the years.