About me
Hi! I am Chengyuan. I grew up in Shanghai and study Computer Science at MIT (BS + MEng).
I am interested in computer systems, particularly software performance engineering. In simple terms: I enjoy making programs run faster!
In addition to computer programming, I like reading, 3D printing, and a bit of typography. I also enjoy Minecraft and anime, though it's increasingly hard to find time for them.
About this blog
I built this blog to record and share my adventures in computing, most often as I hack around random personal or school projects11 Some of my earliest posts also included notes on competitive programming techniques or solutions. Please ignore them: There are better sources for that out there and I was not a particularly good writer back in high school. These posts are here only for archival purposes. . Many of the notes here are just for my reference, but I'd be delighted if you find them useful too!
The blog itself was initially built on top of Hexo and underwent a complete rewrite in Go + HTMX in late 2024 to improve style, customizability, and performance22 I went the extra mile to make this blog work without JavaScript. Try it out! . I hope you like the design of this blog.
Contact
Résumé
Below is my résumé, coded in HTML and CSS. Download PDF
CHENGYUAN MA
(857) 928 8339 [email protected]
Education
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
2021–25- SB and MEng in Computer Science Cumulative GPA: 5.0
- Academic interests: computer architecture, performance engineering, compilers
Work Experience
Citadel – Global Quantitative Strategies
Jun–Aug 2023 & 24Quantitative Research Engineer Intern
2024- Developed framework for A/B testing execution algorithm latency and implemented optimizations for latency reduction
Quantitative Developer Intern
2023- Designed configurable low-latency alternative data ETL pipeline
Technical Skills
- Language: English, Mandarin (native fluency)
- Programming languages: C++, CUDA, Rust, Python, TypeScript & JavaScript, Go, KDB/q, C#, Java
Other Experience
DormSoup
2023–25Cofounder and Tech lead
- Developed LLM-based event catalog application to help MIT students navigate campus-wide free-form advertising emails with Next.js, Postgres, and TypeScript
- Used model cascading to lower LLM cost and ensemble voting + fault-tolerant parsing to improve robustness
- App gained more than 1000 users; now officially recommended by MIT
MIT 6.1100 Computer Language Engineering
2025Graduate Teaching Assistant
- Designed course material and led recitations.
- Developed fastest optimizing compiler (14k lines of Rust, targeting x86) in previous year as student
Competitive Programming
2016–22- Developed proficiency in advanced data structures and algorithms
- 3rd Place at First-year Team Tournament, MIT Battlecode Competition (2022)
- Bronze Medal, National Olympiad in Informatics (China) (2020)
- Platinum, USA Computing Olympiad (2018–20)
Research
MIT Big-data Algorithms and Scalable Systems Group
2023–25- Researched parallelizing compiler targeting CPU and GPU for verifiable computation
- Developed fast zero-knowledge cryptographic primitive (MSM) with WebGPU (ZPrize'24 4th place)
MIT d'Arbeloff Lab
2022–24- Designed Mixed Reality app with novel joint alignment algorithm for robotic rehab therapy (IROS '23)
- Developed controller to coordinate robot's language and motion during therapy (RSS '24)
MIT InfoLab
2021–22- Accelerated recursive MDP solver with CUDA to model social interactions between robots (AAAI '23)
- Built reinforcement learning environment with Unity and experiment RL algorithms
- Some of my earliest posts also included notes on competitive programming techniques or solutions. Please ignore them: There are better sources for that out there and I was not a particularly good writer back in high school. These posts are here only for archival purposes.
- I went the extra mile to make this blog work without JavaScript. Try it out!