About Me

Hi, I’m Xin, I joined WhatsApp/Facebook as a software engineer in Feb, 2021, and have since been working in the product & platform infra domains.

Prior to working full-time at WhatsApp, I obtained my Master’s degree in Computer Science from University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC) in 2020, and my B.S. Computer Science degree from New York University (Abu Dhabi) in 2019. During my school years, I did several engineering and research projects in the Computer Systems and Networking areas.

Work & Research Experience

• Full-stack Web Development at Facebook   May - August 20
  • Set up a new base path and implemented a new server and routing scheme for an advertiser-facing product in Ads Measurement org. Launched the project internally (planned for external launch afterwards).
  • Applied performance optimization techinques to improve the initial page load time of the product.
  • Implemented with ~9k lines of Hacklang(PHP) and JavaScript.
    
    
• Undergraduate Thesis on Blockchain-based P2P Storage System   January - May 19
  • Faculty advisor: Jay Chen
  • Designed and partially implemented a blockchain-based P2P data storage system with a decentralized storage verification scheme and networking stack. The storage system is going to support a decentralized online forum application, where each user has the ability to post and moderate content.
  • Wrote a system design white-paper; implemented with ~5k lines of Golang.
    
    
• Web Development at WeChat Mini Program Center, Tencent   June - August 18
  • Developed real-time, multiplayer game prototypes using the WeChat Mini Game framework and LayaBox HTML5 game engine. Games are designed so that players join and team up from group chats, boosting the communal experience.
  • Expanded the WeChat Mini Program/Game library by adding APIs to support the latest networking, file storage and multimedia features, such as VoIP chat. Developed feature-testing prototypes that cover each added API.
  • Helped solve developer issues on the community forum for three months.
    
    
• P2P Networking Research at Secure Systems Lab, NYU Tandon   June - August 17
  • Faculty advisors: Justin Cappos, Albert Rafetseder
  • Developed a Distributed Hash Table (DHT)-based information advertisement and lookup library for Seattle Testbed, a cloud computing platform for networking and distributed systems research
  • Followed the BitTorrent BEP5 and BEP44 protocol standards; implemented with ~4k lines of Python.

Open Source Projects

• Tandoop, a custom implementation of the Randoop random test generation tool with Java-specific improvements. [code]
• Demo application with React Native frontend, Python Django backend and SQLite+MongoDB storage schemes. [repos]

• Operating Systems class projects [code]

• Chordinate, a React Native app for practicing chord progressions [code]

• Web Development for The Gazelle, NYUAD [contributions]

• Advertise DHT, distributed advertise methods for Seattle RepyV2 library [code] [demo]

• Acamaniac, an academic schedule planner for NYUAD students [code] [demo]

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Xin Tong © 2020