James Kao

👋 I'm James. I'm an engineer and designer. Previously SWE at Meta for 6+ years. Currently building out lona.so and Langilo. I like diving deep into systems.

2024 - Present Langilo A new project for language learners using LLMs. 2022 - Present Lona Lona is a modern calendar application. Self-hosted (out of my garage) and written in rust and webcomponents.

At the very least, it's fast. A full sass application in ~150kb. 2022 - Present Yuzu Consists of a UI library and a private web backend. The web backend supports automatic bundling, hotreloading, file-based routing, auth and the ability to host multiple subdomains. 2016 - 2022 Meta I started my career at Facebook and became a tech lead for several different teams. This included setting the stage for Messenger/WhatsApp interoperability in C and writing its networking/protocol layer. Later on, I joined a small 4-person team within Facebook's incubator org to scrappily build out the next big bets.

I was a top engineer for several halves and once as a rockstar intern. Instagram Tech Lead Android teamrecess · Facebook NPE Incubator React, PHP WhatsApp Messenger Interop Tech Lead iOS, C, objc-C M4 · Messenger Redesign iOS, objc-C Sutro · Facebook Redesign Android Messenger Intern iOS, objc-C WhatsApp Intern Windows Phone 2013 - 2016 Risd/Brown