About me

My name is Ming James Ying, and I'm a licensed amateur radio operator, call sign N2IW.

What I do

I'm a software engineer, I worked for a telecommunications company for 4 years, and have been self-employed for 11 years. I've been a full-time dad for the last two years, and, now I'm ready to return to full-time software engineering.

How Geeky I am

To find out what kind of engineer I am, here are some little stories about me:

1. When I needed financial data for every stock in the market, I couldn’t find any good sources. But the trading software I used had all the data I needed--I just needed to get it out. So I taught myself Perl and regular expressions in about two weeks, and wrote a script that extracted all the data I needed and put it in a database, so I could do some research.
2. When I came to the United States, I needed stock market history data, so I decided to extract it from the Yahoo finance website. This time I chose to use Python. I taught myself Python in about a week, and wrote a script to download all the data and put it into a database.
3. I took an open course online to sharpen my C skills (CS50 from Harvard University). I finished it in a month, including all the problem sets. The course also had lectures about PHP and web programming.
4. Later I wrote a web application using PHP and MySQL, to manage a complex schedule for our local amateur radio club. The organizers loved it, and shared it with other clubs, and now there are several clubs from other states using my web application.