Hello! My name is Xuan Wu. I am a Christian Chinese-American in pursuit of Life, Liberty, and a Ph. D. at Stanford University. I enjoy programming (game and web), playing video games, and tennis (both the regular and the table variety), and have many other interests that you’ll find out as you get to know me more.
This is my web page of 14 years! I started web programming in middle school, and have been captivated by this outlet for creativity ever since. I moved around various free web-hosting services like GeoCities and Tripod in the early years, until college was able to offer a better hosting solution. After many years at stanford.edu, I finally settled down in my own domain in 2008, and now I have my own VPS with Slicehost.
The site’s purpose as a means of personal expression has changed little over the years. Nowadays, I use it to publish articles pertaining to my faith, as well as to showcase some of my work.
I rewrote the entire site from scratch using Ruby on Rails as a way of exploring the nascent technology and to find relief from the burden of the tedium in updating it back when it was written in PHP (plus, Ruby is just really fun to program in). It’s my first experience with a web framework, and all in all, I’m pretty excited about the DRY-ness (Don’t Repeat Yourself) of Rails, which was something I was trying to achieve on my own in PHP (no, I hadn’t heard of frameworks…). It’s a lot easier and more consistent (not to mention secure) when one can build off the work of so many talented programmers.
Hope you enjoy your visit!