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Zhifan Chen SOFTWARE ENGINEER
CV

Background & Focus

About

Software engineer working across product development, backend systems, infrastructure, and developer tooling.

Portrait of Zhifan Chen

Engineering Philosophy

Over several years of building production applications, I have worked across the delivery lifecycle—from React and TypeScript client applications to backend services, database schemas, and Linux deployment environments. That broad exposure shaped how I approach software: prioritizing maintainability, testability, and operational simplicity over cleverness.

My deepest technical curiosity centers on systems, developer tooling, and reproducibility. I believe environment discrepancies and developer friction are among the biggest drains on engineering velocity. By engineering declarative, reproducible workstations and continuous integration workflows with Nix and Linux, teams eliminate whole classes of "works on my machine" failures.

Debugging & Systems Investigation

When systems break, I go beneath high-level abstractions to find root causes. Whether diagnosing dynamic linker failures, memory leaks, transaction contention, or submitting upstream fixes to open-source tools, I look for enduring solutions that prevent recurrence.

Education & International Context

I am based in Milan, Italy, pursuing a BSc in Computer Science at Università degli Studi di Milano concurrently with professional practice. Fluent in English and Italian, with native Chinese, I am comfortable collaborating across distributed international teams and technical cultures.

Have an interesting engineering problem?

I occasionally take on selected part-time projects.

Let's talk