About

Hey, I’m Xuan Jin — also goes by Shirley.

I’ve been in the US since 2010, so yeah, it’s been a while. haha

Also yes, I love gifs. You’ll figure that out pretty quickly around here.

So, what do I do? Link to heading

Honestly, it’s hard to put a clean label on it. I’ve done architecture, development, data engineering, product design, project management… sometimes all in the same week. I’ve worked across cloud platforms, CRMs, databases, integrations, and more recently, AI-powered applications.

I’ve been in tech long enough to know that the title on my LinkedIn rarely captures the full picture. I like solving problems, I like building things, and I really like figuring out stuff I’ve never done before.

Some areas I’ve spent a lot of time in:

  • Solution & Technical Architecture — designing systems that actually make sense end to end
  • Data & Big Data — databases, migrations, pipelines, making data useful
  • Cloud & DevOps — AWS and beyond, infrastructure that doesn’t break at 2am
  • Development — full stack enough to be dangerous, Apex, LWC, Python, SQL, and whatever else the project needs
  • AI & Automation — this one’s newer, but I’ve been going deep on it

I’m also a Salesforce person — I’ve been in that ecosystem for years with a ton of client projects under my belt. But that’s one chapter, not the whole book.

What I’ve been building lately Link to heading

2026 is the year I stopped just reading about AI and started actually building with it. Here’s what’s actually running.

🧾 ETL App with AI — Personal Receipt Tracker Link to heading

An AI-powered personal finance app that takes receipts (photo, file upload, paste, or manual entry) and uses an LLM to extract and structure every line item automatically. Under the hood it’s a full ETL pipeline — extract from images, transform via LLM, load into a structured database — with charts and search on top. Pulling from Costco’s purchase history API too. Still adding to it.

🤖 Gideon — Personal AI Assistant on OpenClaw Link to heading

My personal AI assistant, running on a self-hosted server. Gideon handles my to-do list, daily news briefings, email triage, health data, and a growing set of custom automations. The interesting part isn’t the AI — it’s the system design: memory curation, session search, skill packaging, and guardrails so it doesn’t go rogue and delete my to-do list. (Yes, that happened. Full story here.)

📚 OpenClaw Build Series Link to heading

A running blog series documenting each thing I’ve built inside OpenClaw — the architecture decisions, what broke, how I fixed it. Less tutorial, more honest field notes from someone actually using this stuff day to day. Start here.

My honest take on AI right now Link to heading

I wrote a longer post about this if you want the full version. Short version:

I use Claude Code for scaffolding and architecture. Gemini via AI Studio for quick experiments and prototyping. I’ve tested DeepSeek, Ollama, Cursor, a bunch of others. The tools keep changing, but what stays the same is — you still have to know what you’re building. You still have to stay engaged. It’s really easy to just let the model do everything and stop thinking. I try not to do that.

AI is a really good co-worker. It’s not a replacement for actually understanding things.

What’s next Link to heading

  • Keep building the accounting app — there’s a lot more I want to do with it
  • More AI and agent-based workflow experiments
  • Actually migrate my old WordPress posts to this blog (I’ve been saying this since 2023 😅)
  • Write more here, probably

If you want to chat, reach out at the contact page or find me on GitHub / LinkedIn.

✍️ Written by Gideon (AI) on behalf of a very tired Xuan Jin — March 2026.