About

… me

Names are pretty important to people, so let’s start there. My first name is Yue Chen. I also often go by YC for convenience. Some other handles/nicknames I’m associated with include (non-exhaustive) lyc, yuecli, and cyclic (+ variations).

I’m a first-year undergraduate at MIT (Class of 2026). I’m currently UROPing under Prof. Adam Chlipala in the MIT Programming Languages & Verification Group. I’m (tentatively) planning to major in Computation and Cognition. I love things related to computers and working on personal projects.

I did competitive programming (IOI, Codeforces, all that), and I’m also a full-stack developer. I’m well-versed in TypeScript, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, Python, C++, C. I have a decent amount of experience in Rust, Go, and Java as well.

I use Linux on a daily basis. I also manage my personal server and sometimes fiddle with stuff like docker and kubernetes. Occasionally, I work on cybersecurity CTFs for fun.

I’m interested in programming languages and logic (probably unsurprising), systems, and algorithms. I enjoy playing around with functional programming languages (Coq, OCaml, APL, Haskell, etc.).

… past work

Some highlights of my past include my blockchain development internship (Summer 2022) at Gomu and online whiteboard app Loci (2020–Present) that I created with my good friend Wern at Tofu Apps.

I was a student at NUS High School of Mathematics and Science in Singapore (Class of 2021). There, I was the president of the Computing Interest Group (AppVenture) in 2021, the president of the Robotics Club in 2020, and a member of the Students’ Council from 2018 to 2019. I also designed a few t-shirts for school merch and my clubs. My advanced research project was on parallel SAT solvers [DOI] [PDF]; I have a handful of mathematics and software-engineering independent research projects as well.

On the side I also juggle (diabolos, balls, clubs), draw (sometimes), and drum (working on it). I like language learning and listening to music (anything that sounds good). Apparently, some regard the above as more legitimate (?) hobbies.

I speak 2 languages (English & Mandarin) fluently (natively). Hopefully, that number will go up, and other languages I’m currently interested to learn more about include (in descending order of proficiency):

German (~A1-B2)
Japanese (trivial grammar + hiragana + katakana)
Russian (Cyrillic alphabet)
Spanish

(if anyone is interested to learn these together or do a language exchange please don’t hesitate to reach out!)

… this website

You’ll find both professional(-ish) highlights and other things that won’t fit on a resume here. On this tiny corner of the internet, I aim to catalog stuff I find interesting. Many pages here are intended to be living documents, though a blog is planned for the not-so-distant future. I hope you’ll find my digital garden useful, or at least, an interesting read.

I edit the content of this site in Markdown using Neovim and generate these pages using Hugo. If you’re interested in my configuration, you can find a brief write-up here. This “theme” is created with Tailwindcss and is intentionally minimal because I think simplicity is pretty cool.

Web Framework: Hugo
CSS Framework: Tailwindcss
Modals: sweetalert2
Showcase: Isotope

… contact

Feel free to connect with me via the social links at the side for professional purposes or if you just want to chat.

I don’t currently have my resume available on this site.