# tanchao.xyz — LLMs.txt # Per https://llmstxt.org spec # Chao Tan's personal engineering blog # tanchao.xyz > Chao Tan (tc) is a data governance and privacy engineer with 18 years of experience building and securing large-scale systems. Currently at Snowflake, where he built the data classification platform that auto-tags sensitive data across the cloud. Previously tech lead at Amazon Alexa (14-person team, 100k+ TPS services). Writes about data governance, AI system security, performance engineering, and the honest parts of a career in tech. ## About - [About Chao Tan](https://tanchao.xyz/about/): Bio, background, and contact - [Now](https://tanchao.xyz/now/): What I'm focused on right now - [Work / Hire me](https://tanchao.xyz/hire-me/): Full professional background with structured data for recruiting bots - [Uses](https://tanchao.xyz/uses/): Tools and tech stack ## Posts - [Monthly retro — March 2024](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2024/03/29/monthly-retro/): What I shipped, what I'm focused on next, and what I learned in March 2024 at Snowflake. - [TILs at Snowflake](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2024/03/28/snowflake-til/): Two years of learnings at Snowflake — on performance, product thinking, and technical leadership. - [First month retro](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2022/10/05/hello-snowflake/): When I left Amazon, I scheduled 1-1s with leaders and friends to farewell (virtually) in person. During these chats, mostly my gratefulness to work with them an - [Chao's Habits](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2022/08/03/chaos-habits/): As I am leaving Amazon and pursue my next adventure, what are the essential good work habits that I want to keep? - [Design Philosophy](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2022/06/16/design-philosophy/): 1. Abstract 1. Flexible to change 1. S - [Driver vs Coder](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2022/03/28/driver-coder/): Yesterday I drove to my friend's house for a gathering, during the intersection of I485 & I90, a car speeded up, passed me and then merged in my lane without tu - [API](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2022/02/24/api/): - Never break backward compatibility. Our contract with our customers is sacrosanct. We will never violate that contract. - Work backward from customer use - [Engineering Excellence](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2022/02/03/e-e/): Amazon has a famous concept called OE which is short for Operational Excellence. The other term not so famous, is EE that short for Engineering Excellence. EE f - [Amazon Gems](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2022/01/20/amzn-gems/): There are some good habits that I learnt and practices and established during at Amazon. - [Good reads](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2022/01/13/good-reads/): There is a question in Zhihu (aka. Quora in China) asked "what's the programming book made you WoW?". That's the trigger that I should allocate a post for those - [supertan's principles](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2021/12/07/principles/): Amazon has it's leadership principles to guide the company on decision making. Here are some guide my behaviors: 1. Automation automate everything, particularl - [Tech recordings at Amazon](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2021/07/31/tech-records/): A running log of technical learnings, career reflections, and engineering principles from my years at Amazon Alexa. - [focus on fault tolerance instead of perfectionism](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2021/07/15/basketball-lesson/): Quote from my linkedin post (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tanchaokidsplay-designpattern-activity-6821708682187935744-7rTJ): - [SDE Good Reads](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2021/07/13/sde-good-reads/): 1. https://sre.google/sre-book/service-level-objectives/ 2. https://www.atlassian.com/incident-management/kpis/sla-vs-slo-vs-sli - [hello world again](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2021/07/06/hi-again/): time flies as it always - [Behavior Questions](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2018/04/10/behavior-question/): - Self introduction - Purpose: - Measure: - Answer: - Why choose this company? - Why this team? - Any target team? - Any target field? - Give me a p - [Coding Questions](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2018/04/10/coding/): - 2Sum - Core complexity: - Key idea: - Constraints and edge case: - [System Design Questions](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2018/04/10/system-design/): - Voting system - Basic Problem: - Followups: - How to scale? Huge volume. - How to present realtime results? - Rule of valid vote change, say e - [How to seek job?](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2016/08/10/how-to-seek-job/): 以下内容转载自：Random Mumble，初衷是方便国内朋友浏览。 如有不便请与我联系删除，谢谢。 感谢原作者分享！ - [First Setups and Issues with Thursday](https://tanchao.xyz/posts/2016/07/13/thursday-init/): alias pem file and command ## Notes - [Notes index](https://tanchao.xyz/notes/): Short-form thoughts and learnings ## Machine-readable - [RSS Feed](https://tanchao.xyz/rss.xml): All posts as RSS 2.0 - [Posts JSON](https://tanchao.xyz/api/posts.json): All posts as structured JSON - [LLMs full text](https://tanchao.xyz/llms-full.txt): Full content of all posts in one file - [Sitemap](https://tanchao.xyz/sitemap-index.xml): XML sitemap