ABOUT
Three circles. The middle one is the job.
Design engineer
I build instruments for things that used to be judged by feel. Most of my work sits where taste has to become a number: film physics calibrated against my own negatives, material properties read out of a photograph, an inference API taken apart and measured.
Eye — judgment
Shooting film since 2022 — Canon AE-1P, Nikon FE2, Rolleiflex 3.5F, GFX 100S II. Also crochet, makeup, and the design system this site runs on. Different materials, one skill: knowing when something is off before you can say why.
Hand — build
WebGL2, GLSL, React Three Fiber, real-time pipelines inside a 30fps budget. Four things shipped and live, not four case studies about things that could exist.
Instrument — measurement
Calibration against ground truth, benchmark protocols, variance testing, contrast audits with computed values rather than eyeballs. At Vision On I do this on AI image tools for a living: control the variables, publish the numbers, including the unflattering ones.
Design engineering
Building with taste — the part most people mean when they say design engineer. Resonance, Skeletal Silk, and the component system behind this site.
Tooling and observability
Building the meter, not just the machine. Teardown №1: an inference API instrumented in public — 19.52 ms/step at R² = 0.9978, and the variance lives in the queue, not the model.
Calibration
Turning judgment into something measurable. Latent's film stocks are calibrated against scans of negatives I shot myself, so "filmic" stops being an opinion. This is the rarest of the three overlaps, and the one I would defend hardest.
- Email:
- alilin406@outlook.com
- GitHub:
- github.com/AliLin200446
- LinkedIn:
- linkedin.com/in/alilin406
- Instagram:
- instagram.com/alilinlab