About Me

I studied Computer Science at Gonzaga University, where I played Division 1 tennis on scholarship.

Today I’m an engineering manager at Meta. I lead a group of teams, and the managers who run them, building GenAI camera and real-time video calling across Facebook, Instagram, Messenger and WhatsApp. I joined Meta in 2020 as a staff engineer. Before that I spent three years at Twitter, where I led the team behind Mobile App Promotion in ads, and four years as an early engineer at an adtech startup.

I still build. RallyCut is my side project: it turns tennis match video into rally-by-rally breakdowns and coaching notes, with models I trained myself.

I’m a Top Author on Medium where I write about software engineering, career growth, and technical interviews. On the side, I run a Youtube channel @ZhiaChong where I discuss and share my experience working as a software engineer. I picked up programming and worked my way into a software engineering career through discipline and hard work.

Why I started this blog?

I was born and raised in Malaysia, played a lot of tennis growing up to fill in my time, and played tennis for a Division 1 college. During my college days, I spent a lot of time working in tennis youth camps and helped grow young players. This experience grew my passion for coaching and growing people around me.

I combined two things I love – programming and coaching, to come up with the idea for this blog.

This blog aims to help other software engineers or someone who’s looking to break into the software programming industry for the very first time.

Articles you might enjoy

Here are some of my most-popular articles:

How I landed offers from Microsoft, Amazon, and Twitter without an Ivy League degree: I share my journey as I meet with various top-tier tech companies. I eventually settled with Twitter, and I wanted to share how I did it, my decision-making process and how anyone can do it too.
How to write a great resume for software engineers: Resume is your digital introduction. A great resume gets you through the front door. I partnered with Twitter’s senior recruiter to come up with a list of Do’s and Don’ts to create a stunning resume.
Why I decided to quit Twitter as a software engineer: My learnings and reflections after 3 years working as a software engineer at Twitter.
How I automated my job search by building a web crawler: I built a web scraper to apply for jobs. This landed me multiple interviews, and finally a job with a startup.

Videos you might like

Here are some of my more popular Youtube videos:

You can see more of my projects on my Github.

Want to get in touch? Contact Me.