Hello — I'm
Xingchen
Liu.
Software engineer who likes building things that work,
and figuring out the systems behind the things that don't.
MSCS at Northeastern
· Incoming SDE intern at Amazon.
About
Curious about how good systems get built — and how the great ones stay that way.
I'm a Master's student in Computer Science at Northeastern University, studying distributed systems, scalable backend design, and the messy realities of software at scale.
This summer I'm joining Amazon as a Software Development Engineer intern, which I'm pretty stoked about. Outside of school I tinker with side projects, read engineering write-ups from teams I admire, and try to learn one new thing each week.
Right now I'm focused on getting deep with backend infrastructure — APIs, databases, observability, and the unglamorous plumbing that makes products feel fast.
Work
Currently building.
Project showcases coming soon. In the meantime, here's what I'm exploring.
Distributed Systems Deep-Dive
Working through MIT 6.824 — building a fault-tolerant key/value store in Go. Studying Raft, replication, and the failure modes you only learn the hard way.
Internship Prep
Sharpening data structures, system design, and AWS internals before joining Amazon this summer. Learning the platform from both ends.
Side Project (TBA)
A small full-stack tool to scratch a personal itch — design phase right now. I'll ship it here once it's worth showing.
Reading & Writing
Engineering blogs from Stripe, Cloudflare, Figma, Discord — the good stuff. Notes go into a personal knowledge base I'm building alongside.
Stack
Tools I reach for.
Comfortable here, learning more every week.