Yiming Cao

My career mostly started with a 10-year job at Microsoft, with its first half in China and second in the US. Although it was the "lost ten years" of Microsoft, I had the precious opportunities to work with many fantastic (and eccentric 😄) people and to be exposed to diverse domains: from engineering to research, from developer tools to consumer products, from desktop to the web, from traditional infra to the cloud, from individual contributor to leadership. It set a solid foundation for me for the future.The second stage of my career was with Ptmind, a mar-tech SaaS company, in the CTO role. For the first time, I understood what's meant by "make decisions and take full responsibility". You can't ruin Microsoft whatever you do, but your stupidity can quickly flip a startup. Fortunately, with up and downs during my 5-year service, the business has been growing, and the company is still doing very well. Such startup experience was as precious as it could get for me - making first-hand decisions about products, testing them out in the market, direct engagement with clients, communicating with investors, and many more. The experiences of building SaaS also got me excited about the broadness and rapid evolution of the web development domain.Now I've moved on to the next stage, exploring what I can do to help shape the future of web development, which is exciting and full of uncertainty. I've always believed software construction shouldn't be a privilege only for people with formal training. Solopreneurs, designers, hobbyists, and daydreamers could turn themselves into builders. It was how programming used to be 30 years ago before it got so specialized, expensive and intimidating.Besides work, I'm a ski/snowboard addict and also a private pilot.