# David Jiang **Principal, Theory A LLC** · San Mateo, CA ↔ Shanghai, China dj@theory-a.com · [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/david-jiang-74618251/) · [GitHub](https://github.com/dlwjiang) · [Idea Garden](https://garden.theory-a.com) > Independent builder at the intersection of finance, AI, and classical > Chinese thought. I ship tools that make hidden structure visible — in > markets, in history, in the games we play with ourselves. --- ## Selected Work Projects are the resume. Each of these ships in production; most are solo. ### Finance & Markets - **[Theory A](https://www.theory-a.com)** — financial intelligence platform that fuses Black-Scholes-style random-walk priors with fundamental overlays on a shared temporal axis to surface value dislocations. - **[Options Chain Visualizer](https://www.theory-a.com/optionsChain/NVDA)** — plots contracts at their breakeven points so the implied-move "cone" becomes legible from trading activity alone. - **[Kelly Game](https://www.theory-a.com/kellyGame)** — interactive trainer for building position-sizing intuition under uncertainty. ### Machine Learning & Computer Vision - **[Komi Count](https://komi-count.theory-a.com)** — fully local Go/Baduk image scorer. On-device CV + WebAssembly; nothing leaves the browser. - **[Neural Network Visualization](https://mnist.theory-a.com)** — interactive companion to 3blue1brown's MNIST series, built to make gradient descent feel tactile. ### AI-Native Tools - **[World History](https://world-history.theory-a.com)** — LLM-powered timeline weaver. Shows WWII, Chinese dynastic history, the arc of the Hermès brand, and quantum mathematics braided along a shared axis — an argument that [context is what's scarce](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2022/02/context-is-that-which-is-scarce-2.html). - **[A Casual Dao De Jing](https://a-casual-dao.theory-a.com)** — approachable re-imagining of a text usually gatekept by scholasticism. Proofread against original Chinese. - **[A Casual Gita](https://a-casual-gita.theory-a.com)** — extension of the Dao project into a tradition I don't read natively, leaning heavier on LLM translation as collaborator. ### Writing, Interviews & Art - **[Meowmeow & Woofwoof](https://meowwoof.theory-a.com/gallery)** — bilingual (EN / 中文) anthology of adult fables on the anomie of liquid modernity, staged as Socratic dialogue between a dog and a cat. - **[Path & Play](https://www.youtube.com/@PathAndPlay)** — interview series bridging China and the West. Ongoing. - **[Harmonious Rites](https://constitution.theory-a.com)** — satirical "constitution" in the tradition of Lu Xun, on Confucian 吃人 dynamics in contemporary life. - **[Yuan Ling Tarot](https://tarot.theory-a.com)** — custom deck embodying primal-spirit archetypes. - **[Idea Garden](https://garden.theory-a.com)** — a digital garden where everything above gets thought about in public. ### Earlier - **[D3.js Portfolio](http://dlwjiang.github.io/d3portfolio2/)** — data-visualization experiments from before it was cool. - **[Bayes Impact Hackathon 2014](https://bayeshack.devpost.com/submissions/30292-detecting-and-visualizing-prostitution-rings-teamthorn)** — grand-prize-winning visualization tool for detecting prostitution rings to help prevent child sex trafficking. --- ## Experience **Principal — Theory A LLC** · Mar 2020 – Present · San Francisco Bay Area Solo-founded financial-intelligence platform that visualizes data to reveal the hidden structure of value investing. All projects above ship under this umbrella. **Software Engineer — Google** · Jan 2019 – Feb 2020 · San Francisco Bay Area Google X / Wing drone delivery. Product inventory management and airspace management. **Software Engineer — Apple** · Jan 2016 – May 2018 · Cupertino Lead UI developer on a data-analysis and -gathering platform inside the Siri team. Mentored engineers on declarative, component-based UI patterns; scaled the project across multiple contributors and teams. **Software Engineer — Splunk** · Jul 2014 – Jan 2016 · San Francisco Backbone.js development for a network-data ingestion and analysis application. **Software Engineer — Neustar** · Jan 2014 – Jul 2014 · San Francisco Bay Area AngularJS web development (Bootstrap, SASS, Yeoman, Grunt, Bower, Firebase). --- ## Recognition - **Patent** — [US10700950B2](https://patents.google.com/patent/US10700950B2/en) (inventor, filed as Wei Jiang) - **Bayes Impact Hackathon 2014** — grand prize for a data-visualization tool aimed at detecting prostitution rings and preventing child sex trafficking --- ## Stance Across everything above I'm trying to make hidden structure visible — in markets, in language, in the self-deceptions organizations and people run on. The concerns I keep returning to, in code and in writing at [Idea Garden](https://garden.theory-a.com): - **Self-deception as the central human problem** — the gap between what we claim to believe and what we actually feel or do. *(Resentment as Treasure, The Safety Trap, The Diagnosed Life.)* - **Embodied emotion as suppressed intelligence** — the Gestalt / somatic / Focusing tradition taken seriously, not as vibe. *(Emotional Wisdom, Anger as Secondary Emotion, Focusing.)* - **Structure over character** — office politics, geopolitics, and relationship dynamics as emergent from structure, not moral failure. *(Locally Optimal, Totalitarianism and Loneliness.)* - **Pattern recognition across domains** — I don't think credentialed depth in one tradition beats honest comparative reading across several. I work between Daoist, Confucian, Gestalt, somatic, and probabilistic frames deliberately. A few frameworks I've coined and use as shorthand: *Neural Annealing*, *Mask and Daemon*, *Weaponized Taste*, *Pattern Integrity*, *Fluid Plurality*. Influences I return to: Jed McKenna, Keith Johnstone (*Impro*), James Carse (*Finite and Infinite Games*), Albert Hirschman (*Exit, Voice, and Loyalty*), Adlerian psychology, the Daoist and Confucian classics. I work in English and Mandarin and live between San Mateo and Shanghai, which is as much an epistemic stance as a logistical one: the two information ecosystems don't agree, and the disagreements are where the signal is. --- ## Skills **Languages & runtimes:** TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, WebAssembly, SQL **Frontend:** React, Next.js (App Router), D3.js, Tailwind, Backbone, AngularJS (historical) **ML / AI:** LLM application design, on-device inference, neural-network visualization, CV pipelines **Finance:** options modeling, Black-Scholes, Kelly criterion, volatility surfaces **Content infrastructure:** Prismic CMS, bilingual (EN / 中文) content pipelines **Spoken:** English, Mandarin Chinese ## Education **Cornell University — M.S., Computer Science** · 2013 · Cornell Tech NYC --- *Maintained in machine-readable form at `/resume.md`. LinkedIn is the authoritative source for employment history.*