I'm Bobby. I care about speed, taste, reliability, and the boring details that make good things usable.

I’m Bobby Yan, a CS PhD candidate at Stanford working on machine learning systems.

The short version: I care about making ML systems faster, more useful, and less annoying to actually live with. A lot of technology looks great in a demo and then quietly falls apart the second it touches real people, real latency, real habits, real mess. That’s the part I find interesting. Not just whether something is possible, but whether it is good enough, reliable enough, and ergonomic enough that people actually want it in their lives.

Before Stanford, I studied electrical engineering and computer science at UC Berkeley. Berkeley probably did what Berkeley does best: it made me a little more skeptical, a little more ambitious, and much less patient with vague answers. I like building things, but I care most about the details that make good things usable: speed, reliability, taste, and the thousand small frictions people notice only when they are wrong.

Outside the research/work loop, I am usually moving around in some form. Tennis, badminton, yoga, calisthenics, hiking, long drives, whatever happens to be the current obsession. I like activities where the feedback is immediate. Either the shot lands or it doesn’t. Either the handstand holds or it doesn’t. Either the car took the corner cleanly or it didn’t. There is something nice about that kind of honesty.

I also write here, partly because I think better when I force the thought into words, and partly because having a personal site is still one of the saner things you can do on the internet. I write about technology, tools, driving, work, discipline, taste, and whatever else refuses to leave my head alone. Some posts are polished arguments. Some are just me trying to figure out why something bothers me.

I’m drawn to philosophy for similar reasons. Not philosophy as decoration, where you sprinkle a quote on top and pretend the thing is deep. I mean the annoying, useful kind: asking what you actually believe, whether the belief survives pressure, and what would change if you took it seriously. Love, ambition, work, progress, family, taste, meaning. Big words, yes, but they become very practical once they start deciding how you spend your Tuesday.

Music is a constant. My listening history is scattered across Spotify, SoundCloud, and NetEase Music, which is unfortunate because someone really should build the version of Last.fm that actually understands all of it. I listen to a lot: funk, soul, hip-hop, EDM, pop, rock, jazz, and plenty of things that are harder to label cleanly. Good music is one of the fastest ways to change the weather in your own head.

The part that matters most, though, is still people. Family first. Friends close behind. The late-night conversations, board games that get a little too competitive, karaoke that should probably never be published, trips, photos, videos, all of it. I like work. I like ideas. I like building. But none of it is worth much if the people you love become background noise.

If any of this sounds like your kind of conversation, say hi.