Everything and Anything About Xinjiang Shao

TL;DR

The Short Introduction

Hey there!

This is Xinjiang, a.k.a @soleo on social media. I'm currently working as a Principal Software Engineer at The Aspen Group which focuses on building innovative solutions for the health care industry (dental care, urgent care, animal hospitals and more). Previously, I was a Principal Software Engineer at Peapod Digital Labs (now Ahold Delhaize USA) and a Senior Software Engineer at Peapod, both focusing on e-commerce solutions for grocery delivery and pick-ups. Our solutions powers Stop and Shop, Food Lion, GIANT, Giant Food Stores, Martins and Peapod. I also previously worked for EXACT Sports as a Full Stack Software Engineer. At EXACT Sports, I built our camp registration platform and athletic recruiting platform from scratch over a few years, working closely with CTO Ed Grosvenor and CEO Barry Tarter.

When I'm not coding, I like reading as often as possible, writing occasionally, cooking creatively, and running regularly. In 2024, I also started to learn swimming. I enjoy sharing my thoughts and experiences through this website, and I hope you find something useful here.

If you are interested in working with me, feel free to check out my Résumé, or reach out to me via email directly. My email address is the full spelling of my first name and last name at gmail dot com.

Technologies I Love & Use

How to pronounce my name?

What a Day Looks Like in My Life?

My Running Statistics

• Race Results
• Everyday Running Results

The Much Longer Story

As a kid

I'm Xinjiang. Xinjiang comes directly from the Pinyin of my Chinese name. Most people have some degree of difficulty pronouncing my name. My previous manager Ed Grosvenor wasn't able to pronounce it, and my colleagues at various companies still try to figure it out. In the digital world, I usually go by soleo. It's a made-up word that comes from nowhere, but it's a pretty cool name.

As a kid growing up in China, I still feel a bit strange living in Chicago after all these years. I'm pretty sure I wasn't the smartest kid among my peers. China is usually very competitive, and I certainly didn't go to the top schools or end up working for big corporations initially. However, I do feel like I chose a very unique career path compared to my peers, and I think I made the best choice for myself.

Whenever someone asks me where I come from, I tell them I come from a small town. They assume a small town would be a place with no skyscrapers where everyone knows everyone. But my hometown is packed with people and huge buildings. I'm not kidding! Times Square does exist in my town, and it might be larger than the real one in New York. I've had the dream of becoming a software engineer since I got my first desktop computer in elementary school. Just like any other kid, it was video games that made me curious about how computers work in the beginning. Then one day, my school teacher told me I could stay longer after school, and she would teach me how to do website design. That was 1998, and I started learning how to build websites with Microsoft FrontPage and Dreamweaver.

Time flies, and I was about to choose a major in college after the national college entrance exam. I didn't get a good enough score to get into a top university, but I did a full analysis of what schools I could get into and still make the best of it. I chose a math-related major called Information and Computing Science because I knew I wanted to pursue future education in Computer Science no matter what. A math major would be very beneficial for laying a solid foundation for Computer Science naturally. In college, I met my advisor Prof. Zhishen Wang, who is truly an inspiration to me. He's a friend and a mentor. During my time in his telecommunication lab, I learned a ton about telecommunication hardware, how to conduct research on different topics, and how to explore new ideas.

As an Intern

In College: Sagittarius Tech Co., Ltd.

In my last semester in college, I did an internship at Sagittarius Tech Co., Ltd.. I can still vividly recall the interview with Tomasen Shen and Yangming Dai. I was so new to the industry that I barely knew any answers to the written tests, and I was on my way to fly back to start my winter break, so I still had my luggage with me at the time of the interview. But the next day when I got home, I received a call from Amy, our HR representative, saying I could start working after Chinese New Year. During my time at Sagittarius Tech, I started doing research on subtitle matching optimization with acoustic fingerprinting and supporting a hardware supplier to use our subtitle matching service for their hardware player. Tomasen and Yangming were both very important to my personal development in software engineering. That was the start of my journey to becoming a software engineer.

In the last month of my internship, I told Tomasen that I was planning to pursue further education and get my master's degree in Computer Science at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Soon I started my new life in Chicago. I actually felt really calm when I arrived. At UIC, I really liked Prof. Jakob's courses because he was like a hacker with the right mindset. He would record his entire lesson, and his classes were always filled with personal insights and good demonstrations. If you talked with him in person, you might think he was socially awkward, but whenever he talked about things related to Computer Science, his eyes lit up.

In Graduate School: EXACT Sports

When life was getting boring in grad school, I received an email from Barry Tarter, who is the founder of EXACT Sports. He was looking for an intern and asked if I was interested in working at his company. Since school work was lighter than I thought, I said yes. Ed Grosvenor interviewed me. His last words at the end of the interview were "I'm not picky," and then I started working with him, building our camp registration platform and athletic recruiting platform from scratch over the next few years.

As a Software Engineer

EXACT Sports

I stayed with EXACT Sports for almost 5 years, and I became so personally attached to the product that I would check the status over weekends, sometimes in the middle of the night. It felt great that whenever you had a new idea or got an idea from your coworkers, you could start implementing it and see it grow or fail. The thin layer of management made the product deliver faster, but Barry might disagree with that.

We built a ton of things at EXACT Sports, but one thing hit me very hard, and I was eager to find the answer. Since we built a lot of features during that 5-year period, we didn't remove features very often. We ended up with a codebase that contained lots of defects and one-time-use features that were never used again. So I was curious at that time about how we could manage a clean codebase with features that users actually wanted. Then I got an invite to a Hacker Event. The host of the event was Peapod, the online grocery delivery company that was founded in 1989. I started to wonder if Peapod's engineering team had already figured it out.

Peapod

I went to the event early enough to talk with Tim Franklin and Dan McQuillan. I didn't get my answers that night, and it sounded like there was something new going on at Peapod. Peapod was in the process of transforming from legacy architecture to a more modern architecture. The conversation with Dan made me really want to work with him because he was not only knowledgeable but also very young in his career. I wondered what made him an excellent engineer. Like any other meetup event, I didn't think I would meet Dan or Tim again in the future, but Lynn, Peapod's recruiter, contacted me soon after the hacker event, telling me they were interested in interviewing me for their Full Stack Engineer role. The next day I interviewed and got accepted.

Having worked at Peapod for a few years, I really liked the working environment. It was definitely less stressful than working for a startup, and things were designed in a more detailed, thoughtful manner. But it also moved slower. It was during my tenure at Peapod that I learned to make web applications more accessible for everyone. I started to focus more on front-end development, shared my development stories through Medium blogging, and organized hackathon events internally. I was still learning and still looking for ways to deliver good products to end users.

As a Principal Software Engineer

Peapod Digital Labs

In 2020, Peapod Digital Labs was formed to be the technology and digital innovation engine for Ahold Delhaize USA. I was promoted to Principal Software Engineer at PDL, where I led a team of engineers to build the next generation of online grocery shopping experiences. My focus was on building scalable and maintainable systems that could adapt to the ever-changing needs of our customers.

The Aspen Group

In 2023, I joined The Aspen Group as a Lead Software Engineer, then promoted to Principal Software Engineer in 2024. The Aspen Group is a leading provider of technology solutions for the healthcare industry. My role is to lead the development of innovative software solutions that improve patient care and streamline operations for healthcare providers.

When I joined The Aspen Group, we have a small engineering team (less than 5 engineers). Over the past year, I've been focusing on building a strong engineering culture, implementing best practices, and mentoring junior engineers. We've successfully delivered several key projects that have significantly improved our product offerings and customer satisfaction. We created a robust Digital Commerce Platform that supports digital marketing, office directories, online appointment scheduling, patient reviews, and patient management systems. It has been a rewarding experience to see the positive impact our solutions have on healthcare providers and their patients.

Meanwhile, we also scaled our engineering team to over 20 engineers in 2024, and I'm excited about the future growth and opportunities ahead.

The Future Ahead of Me

Having been in the industry for more than 10 years, I've realized that becoming a good engineer takes a lot of effort, years of learning and practice. Even if you stay curious and learn tons of stuff, there's still new material coming up every day that you cannot keep up with. How do you handle the fear of the unknown? How do you make the right decision when something has to be done on time? There are still tons of questions I haven't fully figured out yet, and I'm looking forward to exploring the answers.