Gary Lai

72 repos
239 followers
487 following

Ruby 28%
TypeScript 21%
JavaScript 13%
Python 10%
HTML 8%

Hey, I'm Gary 👋 I build things — mostly software, and over the years, a handful of startups. I'm happiest taking an idea from an empty repo to something real…

Hey, I'm Gary 👋

I build things — mostly software, and over the years, a handful of startups.

I'm happiest taking an idea from an empty repo to something real people use. Co-founding and building startups taught me that the hard part is rarely the code — it's building the *right* thing. That lesson stuck: these days, alongside shipping software, I spend a lot of my time coaching engineers to think like product people, not just ticket-takers.

I have a particular soft spot for open source that helps Taiwanese developers ship better user experiences — small, focused libraries for the fiddly local problems (ZIP codes, ID validation, locale-aware pickers) that every Taiwan-facing product runs into. If I can save another developer an afternoon of yak-shaving, that's a good day.

These days I write mostly TypeScript, but I came up on Java and Ruby and I'm still right at home in both. On the engineering side I care about the unglamorous plumbing that makes products trustworthy at scale — multi-tenant systems, access control, real-time data — and lately I've been tinkering on the Cloudflare stack (Workers, D1) for fun.

I'm based in Southern California, where you'll usually find me at a baseball game when I'm away from the keyboard.

Open source for Taiwan's developer community

| Project | What it is |
| --- | --- |
| use-tw-zipcode | React Hook for Taiwan city / district selection, with ZIP code lookup |
| taiwan-validator | Validators for Taiwan IDs, business numbers, and license plates |
| use-country-list-zh | React Hook for a Chinese-language country picker with fast filtering |
| use-wg | Convert Chinese characters to Wade–Giles romanization |
| ts-package-starter | The TypeScript starter template I use to ship these as npm packages |

A few things about me

🔭 Currently building small developer tools and helping engineers grow a product mindset
🌱 Learning my way around the Cloudflare stack (Workers, D1) for side projects
👯 Happy to collaborate on open source that makes life easier for Taiwan-facing products
💬 Ask me about taking products 0-to-1, startups, or why the hard part is never the code
⚡ Fun fact — my little Taiwan-locale libraries quietly run inside more apps than I'll ever know about

A little background

My master's research was in natural language processing. I've long since moved on from NLP, but it left me with a soft spot for data and a habit of thinking in systems.

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