About the writer — Stan Lee (이승훈)↗
Hello, and thank you for stopping by.
I’m a software engineer living in Rocklin, California. I’m also a husband and a father of three. And I’m someone whose life has never once gone in a straight line — which turns out to be most of what I have to write about.
It began with wanting something badly↗
When I was fifteen, in Daegu, South Korea, I decided to try for a science high school that admitted about 120 students out of the city’s seventy-odd middle schools. I had no business applying. I had spent middle school sleeping ten hours a night, playing basketball, and reading comics under my desk. My grades were nowhere near the cutoff.
For about a month I slept two hours a night and studied the other available hours except eating and commuting. I kept a bowl of cold water in my room and washed my face whenever I started to drift. It was not a sustainable way to live and I would not recommend it to my own children. But I got in.
That year rearranged how I understood my own life. It taught me that wanting something badly enough — and then doing the unreasonable work — can move an outcome that looked fixed. Almost everything since has been a test of whether that is still true.
The years that looked like failure↗
It was not, at least not reliably.
I graduated early, studied electrical engineering and computer science at KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology), worked in a startup company, and began my career as a hardware engineer in Korea. Then the work broke me down — endless overtime, a doctor telling me in my early twenties that I was making myself ill, and a slow realization that I could not see a future in it. So I left, transferred into the business school at SNU (Seoul National University), and spent two and a half years trying to imagine a different life.
Near graduation I aimed at an American MBA. I studied for over a year, applied to top programs, and was rejected by every one of them. The following year I tried a business PhD instead, made it through the interviews, earned the department’s recommendation, and was turned down at the final gate. It felt like every clock in the world had stopped.
I gave myself one more year. I took the TOEFL seven or eight times, flew to Japan twice to sit the GRE because the computer-based test had been suspended in Korea at that time, juggled seven or eight tutoring jobs to pay for it all, and applied to 27 programs. Seven said yes. I chose Yale, and at thirty-one I finally landed in America.
Learning a country↗
The degree was never the point — building a life here was. So I studied computer science, returning to code I had been away from for four years, and finished the master’s in a single year.
At the same time I was doing the job hunting, in a language I could barely follow. I sent out roughly 1,300 applications and sat through seventy or eighty phone interviews. Microsoft flew me to Redmond and passed. LSI flew me to Pennsylvania and then restructured. Dell flew me to Texas and said yes, and on 15 August 2011 I started writing BIOS and UEFI firmware in Round Rock, TX.
For a long time after that, the hardest part of the job was not the code. It was the twenty-person team meeting where everyone said what they had worked on that week, and I sat there dreading my turn. English stopped being an obstacle only when I stopped studying it and started living inside it — reading books I actually cared about, sharing dinners for six months with the American host that I stayed in Arizona, making friends from all around the world.
Choosing, finally↗
I spent four years in firmware before Dell put me into a rotation program. The first year landed me on PCIe storage hardware, calibrating analyzers in a lab, three days at a time to get a clean signal, barely touching code. I missed programming so much it ached.
The second year, I chose for myself — a web team, JavaScript and Node.js, a field I knew nothing about. It was the first time in my working life I picked the work instead of accepting it. Everything since has followed from that choice: backend engineering at a startup in Austin, then Rivian in Palo Alto, where I built GraphQL infrastructure and, a year and a half later, watched the company go public.
What I write here↗
For years I only wrote about software and about getting here — the study-abroad guides, the job-hunt series, the two magazine articles I published back in 2012. Those helped people, and I am glad I wrote them. (those Korean articles are in https://seunghun.com)
But I am in a different part of life now. My most recent essay is about how a life accumulates threads — work, money, family, old choices, regrets, obligations — until pulling on any one of them tugs a dozen others. I have come to think the goal is not to untangle everything. It is to learn which threads to work loose and which to simply carry. And that a life with no tangles at all would probably be a shallow one, because we get tangled precisely through loving, committing, and wanting things.
So this site is wider than the last one. I will write about engineering, AI era that we are facing, immigrant life, family, and life. And the parts of a career nobody puts on a résumé — the rejections, the detours, the years that looked like waste and turned out to be the route.
I write to consolidate what I have learned and to find out what I actually think. If you are somewhere in the middle of your own detour, I hope some of it is useful.
Elsewhere↗
- seunghun.com — the same journey, written in Korean
- sweng.dev — writing specifically about software engineering
- stanlee.tech — résumé and portfolio
Hope you find something worth taking with you here! 🙏🏼