About me

General stuff

My name is Lloyd Chan (online, my handles are lloydmeta or meta_Lloyd) and I currently live in Tokyo, Japan. I’m a pretty chill guy who enjoys building stuff on the computer, learning different languages (currently studying German and Rust, so both natural and programming), time with his wife, travelling to interesting places, history, and soccer/football. Listening to music is a guilty pleasure of mine.

More serious stuff

A biomedical engineer by training (graduated from the University of Toronto’s Engineering Science program with a Bachelor of Applied Science in Biomedical Engineering), a software engineer by trade. I’m generally biased towards using existing lightweight solutions that solve my problems, but as you can probably tell from this blog, I don’t shy away from getting my hands dirty and building things “from scratch”.

I’ve adopted Scala and Ruby as my main languages; Ruby for quick and dirty prototyping, and Scala for scalability and sheer speed (also, very enjoyable to program with). Having made a living developing with Scheme for almost 2 years at the beginning of my working career, I consider myself a believer of the Functional Programming paradigm, yet I recognise the merits of Object Oriented programming. Both Scala and Ruby allow developers to harness the strengths of both styles and have amazing language features. In the end I try to pick the appropriate tool for the job.

Lately I’ve been studying Rust so that if needed, I can use a modern language that is “close to the metal”; resource-efficient and no GC to cause latency issues. To teach myself the language, I’ve read through the official manual and started building an FP library for Rust called Frunk.

Here are some links about me that might be interesting: