About Me

I am currently a master’s student at Carnegie Mellon University. I obtained my bachelor’s degree in computer science from Shanghai Jiao Tong University.

I can be referred to as any combination of Alex, Chi and Zhang. For example, Alex Chi, Chi Zhang, Alex Chi Z., or Chi (Alex) Zhang.

I have focused on building system software, especially database systems, during my undergraduate and graduate study. I built AgateDB during my internship in PingCAP, worked on TerarkDB for Zoned Namespace SSDs at ByteDance, and participated in the early stage development of RisingWave at RisingWave Labs (formerly known as Singularity Data). This summer, I worked at Neon, which provides fully managed Postgres service.

I love becoming part of the open-source community. I’m currently the TiKV project’s maintainer. In addition, I maintain several widely-used projects like SJTUG mirror and SJTUThesis in the SJTUG community. Furthermore, to enable more students to learn about database systems, I built an educational OLAP database called RisingLight with my friends. The SQL layer of RisingLight was then ported to BusTub, the course project for CMU 15-445/645 Database Systems, which made BusTub become a real SQL database system.

I’m interested in exploring how to productively use the Rust programming language in data-intensive applications. Based on my previous experience, I crafted two tutorials on building database system components in the Rust programming language. type-exercise-in-rust is a tutorial for building a vectorized expression evaluation framework in database systems. And in mini-lsm, you will learn how to build a LSM-tree storage engine.

For the future, I am constantly seeking opportunities to build things that excite me and impact people.