About

Hi! I'm Wan. You can reach me at wanshenl [at] andrew [dot] cmu [dot] edu.

Random fun facts:

  • I believe that I'm the first (and only) Bruneian undergraduate PhD student at CMU.
  • I believe that I'm also the first CMU CS undergrad to graduate with two SCS concentrations, though that's mostly from being the first concentrations batch and stumbling my way into it.
  • I've helped to raise chickens. I also have a MOOC cert in chicken behavior.
  • I grew up in "starfruit village".

Interests

I like systems programming, distributed systems, and databases. I'm generally interested in the tradeoffs that people make between speed, memory, formalism, and communication. I admire efficient systems and reproducible research.

List of things that I want to learn more about some day, in no particular order: combinatorics, information theory, streaming algorithms, randomized algorithms, approximation algorithms. I used to be into cybersecurity, which is probably how I got into CMU as an undergrad (CTFs). I will be somewhat disappointed if "scale is all you need" nowadays.

Hobbies

I used to play DOTA2, TF2, and assorted MMORPGs. I also went through a brief League, CSGO, and Valorant phase. I don't play much nowadays.

I enjoy creating teaching material, typically aimed at an introductory level. I particularly believe that everyone should have access to good learning resources (whether they make good use of it or not is up to them). If you're doing something in this space, I'm interested in chatting! Please include "capybara" in your message to get through spam.

I spend an inordinate amount of my time sleeping, reading about food, or browsing cute subreddits. Some good YouTube channels:

Things I Use

This is not an explicit endorsement, but I use the following. If you have recommendations, please feel free to email me.