My Life in Five Minutes

The philosophy I live by:

You are too focused on the future without realizing that today is exactly what you prayed for years ago.

I'm Lin Hugo — a software builder currently pursuing a Master of Science in Computer Science at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering. My interests sit at the intersection of web development and large-scale software systems, where I care deeply about quality, reliability, and efficiency.

I grew up studying Atmospheric Sciences at National Central University in Taiwan, where I picked up a minor specialty in Programming Design along the way. The detour from weather systems to software turned out to be less of a detour and more of a natural path — both fields are fundamentally about modeling complex systems and making sense of them. I graduated in June 2024.

During those four years I kept one foot in the classroom and one foot in industry. I served as a teaching assistant for five courses — from Freshman English to Programming Python and Weather & AI — supporting over 250 students. Outside coursework, I managed a year-long project to build an orientation website for incoming freshmen; our team shipped a Blog feature that drew 2,000+ visitors per page.

#Work

My most recent experience is as a Software Engineer Intern at Hayden AI in the San Francisco Bay Area for Summer 2026. Excited to network with you all!

Prior to that, in early 2025, I joined Futurenest as an R&D Engineer Intern. There, I shipped Django REST APIs with 100% test coverage, containerized services through AWS ECR, and integrated a Next.js chat interface with a custom backend.

In early 2024, I interned at eCloudvalley as a Cloud Engineer, leading a five-person agile team to deliver a serverless AWS Bedrock solution. We built a multi-modal ticket classification system that achieved 95% accuracy and improved operational efficiency by 80% through automation. The project was ultimately recognized as the top-performing internship project across all cohorts.

My industry journey began in the summer of 2023 at PEGATRON Corporation, where I worked as an AI Engineer Intern on the Smart Manufacturing team. I developed a Large Language Model proof-of-concept that I presented directly to the CTO, and the team received a Silver Award for the project. During the same summer, I also served as an AWS Campus Ambassador, organizing cloud computing workshops that reached more than 700 developers and achieved a 96% satisfaction rate.

#Beyond code

I shoot film and digital photography whenever I can — mostly street and travel, capturing the human touch in fleeting moments through light and lines. The discipline of a single frame taught me to pause: golden light in a quiet café, the space between strangers on a sidewalk. Beauty is neither rare nor hidden; it surrounds us constantly. What is missing is our willingness to notice and feel it — an idea I explored in The Seen, shaped by a Rodin quote I first encountered in high school. More of my photography lives in episodes.

On random weekends I visit art museums — MoMA, local galleries, wherever I can slow down and be present with the work. I love the silence they bring: the blank space around a painting creates room to think, feel, and respond on my own terms, without rushing to decode every label. Art is not what you see; it's what you feel.

I also make pictures with code — procedural textures, noise fields, and visual experiments where a seed number becomes something that looks like it has been sitting in the rain for thirty years. No brushes, no cameras, just math. I keep those experiments in Art.

In a world that moves fast, beauty is how I slow down — and I carry that same patience and attention to variation within constraint into writing and engineering.

If any of this resonates, feel free to reach out.