My name is You Gao (U高), this is an about me.

TL;DR: Born in '04, I'm a developer based in Richmond, VA. I studied computer science and global studies at my state university. You can email me at hello@yougao.dev!

The longer story is that I was born in Queens, NY and lived there until my 5th birthday, when my parents decided to move to the rural county of New Kent in Virginia. I never really fully adapted myself to living in the area, though the field trips were memorable because of all the historical landmarks and battlegrounds. Went through my school years doing the bare minimum to get good grades and spent way too much time playing video games; hindsight is 20/20. After high school, I went to the University of Virginia without much of a plan and decided computer science was an option because I grew up using technology. I decided to take on a global studies degree as an antidote to the oddness of what was happening in the world around me.

Career-wise, I first began in a research lab operating under the cancer center at my university. The decision was largely driven by my desire to do data science, plus all of the hype surrounding the field at that time. Did a summer there with an NIH grant. My next two internships in DevOps and Platform engineering cemented my weirdness in actually enjoying infrastructural work, as most of my peers went on to be standard software developers. Those experiences furthered my interests in distributed systems, software architecture, and systems programming. It also made me realize my general passion for technology as a holistic enterprise encapsulating the people, software and infrastructure on which our daily lives run.

Currently, I am still in college, finishing off my last semester before joining the workforce. It does seem like a rather bleak market I am entering into, which is why I have been rushing to get certified by everything under the sun. I have gotten certs such as AZ-900, DP-900, AZ-104 and A+. Aiming to finish off the CompTIA Trinity with Net+ and Sec+. Might even get my Cloud Practitioner cert from AWS and then a solutions architect cert if it takes that much to show 4 YoE. Working part-time as a WordPress developer + GIS mapping to pay for those cert costs, which surprisingly has been a good deal of fun.

Hobby-wise, I write on my blog from time to time about random thoughts I have, books I read, and commentary on the developer zeitgeist. My more leisurely activities include watching movies and playing fighting games. My favorite movie is still Perfect Days, and I'm looking forward to Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls being released, though I have never played a tag team fighter before. An older hobby of mine was making keyboards, but keeping up with that will inevitably drain a person's wallet.