about(1) — a longer biography

I'm Justin, a software engineer based in Brentwood, CA. I graduated from UC Irvine in March 2025 with a degree in Software Engineering, where I focused on algorithms, data structures, and full-stack web development.

I love working on problems that span the stack — from designing indexing strategies that shave milliseconds off query times, to shipping responsive UIs that feel good to use, to training reinforcement learning agents on real games. My most recent project is AscensionAI, a distributed RL system that trains an AI to play Slay the Spire through behavior cloning and PPO fine-tuning, with a 717-dimensional observation encoder, a 66-monster knowledge base, learned deck-building (the policy sees its full deck and chooses card removals and upgrades), action masking over 134 discrete actions, and parallel rollout workers feeding a central offline trainer — deployed headless and self-healing on a GPU-less GCP spot VM, so it trains continuously and recovers from preemption on its own.

Other projects include a search engine over 56,000+ web pages, a capstone archive built with React and Django, and a full-stack social platform with real-time messaging.

I'm currently looking for software engineering roles where I can contribute to a cross-functional team and keep growing as an engineer. If you're hiring or just want to chat, reach out anytime.