About Ryan Wong.

I was born and raised in the Bay Area. My dad worked in IT my whole childhood, so the house always had computers in it and someone working on them. I wrote my first Hello World in Java in seventh grade. I took a Computer Science Principles class in high school and fell in love with it. My first formal CS course was junior year, also Java, and it was hard. People say coding either clicks for you or it doesn't, but I don't really see it that way. Pointers and object-oriented programming were a wall for me, and I climbed it the slow way, by putting in the work and getting a little better every time. I've never stopped doing that.

My first internship was at Sephora in 2022, and then I went to Intuit in 2023. I won't bore you with what I shipped, but what I will say is that this was my first real look at what code at scale actually feels like. To be fair, it was overwhelming, but overwhelming in the best way. It left me wanting more.

After graduating, the truth is I had no idea what I wanted to do. The job market was rough and I wasn't sure of my own goals. I was working the front desk at Crunch Fitness trying to figure it out when I met Jonathan. He was a member, I mentioned I was looking for work, he sent me to a recruiter. We found out that we both attended UCSD and kept talking. A few months later he told me he was quitting his job to start something of his own, and asked me to start it with him. With a couple of (failed) ideas in mind, we started Lucile. Truth is, at the time I believed I wasn't ready. I was worried I was out of my league. I learned in public, badly and then better. Over fifteen months I ran engineering, built a platform that real contractors ran their businesses on, and did a contract stint as an AI engineer at Sephora on the side. I left Lucile in September 2026. The honest reason is burnout. It isn't how I wanted it to end, but it was the right call for my own wellbeing. I still don't have what comes next figured out, and I'm fine with that.

Fun fact: I've been running an auto detailing business on the side since I was 17. People give laughs when I tell them, because it's the most random sentence to drop in a conversation. But it's the reason I have a business brain at all. Detailing cars taught me that I could actually build a business on my own, and everything I bring to a company that isn't code, I learned first in that side hustle.

Truth be told, I don't fit the standard engineer mold. The technology is interesting to me, but it has never been the sole thing I identify with. I'm a builder who happens to write software, not a software engineer who happens to build things. That distinction is what makes me, me.