Hi! I’m Chong, and this is my garden
I'm a nerd at heart, I like to solve interesting problems, I'd call myself a cross-discipline generalist, maybe even a maverick, an AI once read my Obsidian Vault and said I have hacker mystic vibes and I took that and ran with it. This is my website! It contains a broad survey of my current and past interests and I hope it gives a clear overall picture of my intellectual life. Below are the four areas that are on my plate right now - click the headers to be brought to the relevant section of the project page.
Besides my technical interests I like to go hiking on the many trails around Sydney, play basketball in a couple of social leagues, play board games, read fiction, and give my balcony a Bohemian look.
Streamlining Workflows
Making personal apps and tools to make it all as minimal and intuitive as possible
I used to play Starcraft: Brood War fairly competitively, so I guess a bit of the same optimization philosophy has come from there. And in the age of AI I'm finding more and more that with implementation being so cheap, the bottleneck becomes cognitive overhead. I've always though of optimizing your workflow as something like tuning a laser, and when friction becomes lower than the activation energy is when one can enter a flow state. Near the threshold every tiny little bit counts. So yeah I would've been the guy spending hours tuning a IDE plugin just to save a couple of extra clicks now and again (although I didn't use Vim or Emacs). The idea is that your workflow should be intuitive enough that anything you should be able to do, you can do.
My projects in this vein include
- Tauri Explorer, my main project right now, a file explorer app using Rust + Svelte (the Tauri framework) made exactly the way I want it.
- My overall setup at home, which involves a fairly elaborate Hyprland setup, a homemade status bar, and a fairly huge dotfile repo (using chezmoi).
- Having all my intellectual context be in one place to be agent searchable - for example setting up scrapping to sync all my ChatGPT/Claude conversations, Twitter/Substack bookmarks, Obsidian Vaults, all in one place.
I also have a number of minor interests Please see [here] for more details.
Exploring AI Capabilities more Broadly
Fun experiments to see what the models are capable of, and frameworks to leverage AI at scale
I find sometimes you know intellectually you know what models and harnesses of today are capable of, but it often take a fortuituous moment to really have it sink in. For months I knew that I could use voice on Codex/Claude code, and I thought it was a bit of a gimmick. Then one day I was getting Codex to debug my microphone, started speaking through it, and realized I could just ask Codex something like "make my wallpaper higher res" and it'd go DO IT - send the relevant request to the OpenAI image API and change the wallpaper on your computer directly, it's only then it really clicked in my hindbrain "oh, I can just tell the computer to DO STUFF". So I like to have a good idea of what's possible with the current generation of frontier models and just TRY things - doing what's in your head is how you expand your idea of what's possible, and very much is possible with AI that hasn't gotten into my head yet. A couple of fun experiments along these lines are:
- Making websites using a custom asset generated workflow similar to what's done for AAA games - this website was made from some of them - try clicking on the "style" button in the sidebar to switch to one of several styles - forgive the AI slop factor.
- Making versions of my favourite games - eg I tried to make a first person clone of Diablo 1 in Unreal 5 Engine by basically saying exactly this to GPT 6 Astra when it came out - the results were… passable for a 2010 game I suppose but still not there yet.
- Making a alternative/indie rock version of E for Exctinction by Thousand Foot Crutch - beware, it's an abomination but my curiosity gets the best of me.