Intro: Self-taught Principal Engineer (7 years). I do not have a CS degree. I learned via MIT OCW in a hospital hallway to pay for my wife's delivery bills. That night, code became my survival mechanism.
Why I am an Outlier:
The "Revenge" Build (Why I built my own IaC SDK) I applied to Pulumi. They loved my technical manifesto but rejected me due to "Wrong Region." I did not give up. I built reactor-dev from scratch in 2-3 months (Drift detection, K8s reconcile loops).
The Validation: A major EV Tech Giant rejected me (no degree), yet they cloned my private repo 13 times to study the architecture. Engineers validated the code, even if HR rejected the person.
Frugal Engineering (The $5 vs $500 Mindset) I am building a social graph backend (DNA Platform) solo. I have no VC money for Cloud DBs.
Solution: I architected a custom Kvrocks + RAMDisk engine with UUIDv7 sorting.
Result: Reduced infra costs from ~$500/mo to $5/mo (100x reduction). 1000 retries dropped to 0.
Resilience I have been rejected by WorldQuant, Nvidia, and Zalo purely for "No Degree." Yet, I continue to ship production-grade distributed systems.
What I am looking for: I am not looking for a "stable job" to hide in. I am looking for a Founder/CTO who values execution over credentials. If you need an engineer who treats your infrastructure budget like their own grocery money, let's talk.
Portfolio:
IaC SDK Source: https://github.com/reactor-cor/reactor-dev
Live Demo (Vimeo): https://vimeo.com/1141575744
Build-in-public (DNA social platform - current): https://bsky.app/profile/thaianhsoft.bsky.social (for post technical)
Intro: Self-taught Principal Engineer (7 years). I do not have a CS degree. I learned via MIT OCW in a hospital hallway to pay for my wife's delivery bills. That night, code became my survival mechanism.
Why I am an Outlier:
The "Revenge" Build (Why I built my own IaC SDK) I applied to Pulumi. They loved my technical manifesto but rejected me due to "Wrong Region." I did not give up. I built reactor-dev from scratch in 2-3 months (Drift detection, K8s reconcile loops).
The Validation: A major EV Tech Giant rejected me (no degree), yet they cloned my private repo 13 times to study the architecture. Engineers validated the code, even if HR rejected the person.
Frugal Engineering (The $5 vs $500 Mindset) I am building a social graph backend (DNA Platform) solo. I have no VC money for Cloud DBs.
Solution: I architected a custom Kvrocks + RAMDisk engine with UUIDv7 sorting.
Result: Reduced infra costs from ~$500/mo to $5/mo (100x reduction). 1000 retries dropped to 0.
Resilience I have been rejected by WorldQuant, Nvidia, and Zalo purely for "No Degree." Yet, I continue to ship production-grade distributed systems.
What I am looking for: I am not looking for a "stable job" to hide in. I am looking for a Founder/CTO who values execution over credentials. If you need an engineer who treats your infrastructure budget like their own grocery money, let's talk.