Welcome, Xiangkun

I’m Xiangkun Liu. I was born in Fengxian, Shanghai, and currently live there as well. I speak Chinese, English and a tiny bit of Japanese.

Before joining wiredcraft, I was lucky enough to participate in the full lifecycle and stack of a software. And now I’d like to take the opportunity to participate in various great products both internal and external as a DevOps engineer.

I think the most exciting thing about DevOps is to automate things, define infrastructure and beyond in addition to software as code, and keep applications up and running with monitoring, reporting, alerting and even self-healing.

1. What are the three things you like about Wiredcraft? Or what attracted you to apply here?

The most great thing about Wiredcraft is the opportunities to work with various clients, helping them build great products. I like to learn from different people and build better products.

The other great thing is that Wiredcraft organizes lots of meetups and conferences. I can learn from others in a range of topics and share back to the community.

The third is about the working environment here. Open and comfortable. In addition, Friday lunch, team buildings, and yearly retreat, all those things make working here balanced with life.

2. What’s the most adventurous experience you have had?

As a DevOps engineer, one adventurous experience I’ve had is to revert a faulty version of application deployed to production. What made it more difficult is that I had to revert database schema deployed with the application to a previous working state. Since everything is online and customer-facing, I had to be very careful to bring things to normal instead of breaking more things in a time-constrained manner.

3. What hobbies do you have?

Actually I do love coding as it gives me the feeling of being an engineer and allows me to build applications which will benefit lots of others.

Besides, I find that music, particularly instrumental, helps me to calm down and gain inner peace. I also took some time to learn the piano.

4. If there’s one thing you recommend everyone in the world to do, what would it be?

I would recommend everyone to try a new thing or a new option whenever it’s possible. A new world will open to you if you keep trying new things.

5. What is the project your are the most proud of?

I’ve done several toy projects that receive good community feedback. One of them is a JavaScript library to parse Java .properties file format, which currently has 10k+ downloads per week. This does motivate me a lot to continue working on open source projects.

6. What’s the most underestimated talent you have?

I can do home-grade electrician, plumbing and networking :)