About Me

I obtained my bachelor’s degree in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and my master’s degree at Carnegie Mellon University. Currently, I work as a Systems Software Engineer at Neon.

I can be referred to as any combination of Alex, Chi and Zhang. For example, Alex Chi, Chi Zhang, Alex Chi Z., or Chi (Alex) Zhang.

I focused on building system software, especially database systems, during my undergraduate and graduate study. I built AgateDB during my internship in PingCAP, worked on TerarkDB for Zoned Namespace SSDs at ByteDance, and participated in the early stage development of RisingWave at RisingWave Labs (formerly known as Singularity Data). In summer 2023, I worked at Neon, which provides fully managed Postgres service.

I love becoming part of the open-source community. I’m currently the TiKV project’s maintainer. In addition, I maintain several widely-used projects like SJTUG mirror and SJTUThesis in the SJTUG community. Furthermore, to enable more students to learn about database systems, I built an educational OLAP database called RisingLight with my friends. The SQL layer of RisingLight was then ported to BusTub, the course project for CMU 15-445/645 Database Systems, which made BusTub become a real SQL database system.

I’m interested in crafting educational materials in database systems. I have two tutorials on using the Rust programming language in data-intensive applications: type-exercise-in-rust is a tutorial for building a vectorized expression evaluation framework in database systems, and in mini-lsm, you will learn how to build a LSM-tree storage engine. I worked as a teaching assistant for CMU-DB’s BusTub database system for three semesters, during which I designed the SQL query frontend of the query processing project, as well as the MVCC project based on HyPer. With my experience with the BusTub system, I wrote the write-you-a-vector-db tutorial where students can add vector capabilities to a relational database system.

For the future, I am constantly seeking opportunities to build things that excite me and impact people.