Patrick Shyu
Patrick Shyu is a software engineer, entrepreneur, and social media creator. He creates content on tech, finance, and lifestyle and is an ex-Google / ex-Facebook software engineer.
Hi, I’m Patrick Shyu. Welcome to my personal homepage. Here’s a little bit about me.
About
I’m an American entrepreneur, software engineer, and content creator. With 1+ million followers across social media platforms, I create content about tech, finance, and lifestyle. I share education and insights, while inspiring with entertainment and humor.
TechLead on YouTube
I began my coding journey in a Silicon Valley elementary school self-learning QBasic and Visual Basic to make small games. Graduating from UC Berkeley with high honors, I majored in Computer Science (EECS) including a one year study-abroad program in Japan my senior year at the Tokyo Institute of Technology. The study-abroad has been one of the best years of my life, being both fun and a perspective-broadening experience. Upon return, I attended UC San Diego for my Master’s Degree in Computer Science (Computer Graphics emphasis), while also placing in the ACM programming competitions. I worked internships at Microsoft, Juniper Networks, and Sun Microsystems with the highlight meeting Bill Gates at his house in Seattle. On campus, I built numerous pet projects such as social media apps, schedule planners, and event websites used by thousands of students coded in self-taught Perl/CGI and Java.
After university, my first job was at Sony Pictures in Los Angeles in 2007, working on 3D special effects for Hollywood films where I coded in C++, Python, and OpenGL. In retrospect, this entry-level job remains one of my best jobs throughout my career.
On weekends and evenings, I created apps and games on Facebook platform, some of which went viral to millions of users in PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript. Few people understood what an app was at the time. After much hesitation, I finally quit my job, booked a spontaneous 3-month flight to London, and went full-time on my app reaching 2 million users while working out of Starbucks cafes and Apple stores for the WiFi. In total, I built around 50 apps, many failing but some that would reach millions of users scaled across 10 high-end web servers & databases. Modern autoscaling technologies weren’t available at the time, so it was quite stressful keeping servers online in the middle of the night.
After the Facebook apps era faded, I grew bored and eventually returned to the office, working at various Silicon Valley startups, including at Groupon where I coded in Ruby on Rails. This job did not last long and I soon quit that too out of boredom.
By 2013, on a whim I relocated to New York to pursue my own web project ideas, as well as to teach myself stock trading. As I coded trading algorithms in Python, daytraded commodities, futures, and options, and read news all day, I came to realize how much time I wasted just trying to beat the markets. Additionally, while renting a highrise apartment as if in an ivory tower, I realized how isolating luxury can be, and so left the city to begin what would become a journey into minimalism, embracing experiences over materialism.
Having achieved success early on, it would be a waste to save it all for a typical old-age retirement. I wanted to maximize the combination of 4 factors I identified: health, wealth, time, and youth/vitality. My interest in travel and lifestyle design would begin here.
I traveled the European backpacker routes staying in hostels on a month-long journey through the Swiss Alps, the French Riviera, and Southern Spain. In my travels, I grew interested in photography and timelapse videos, which were just taking off at the time, and led me to start my first YouTube channel Blue Eden, a travel photography channel with 1.5m views. This was a lot of views at the time, gaining sailboat sponsorships, stock footage sales, and features in popular blogs. Alongside my exploration into semi-pro photography, I developed a popular timelapse desktop software application gaining 500k user sessions coded in Adobe AIR.
Blue Eden on YouTube
By 2014, I ported my old Facebook web games to the recently announced iPhone, teaching myself iOS development. In total, I launched about 9 apps to the App Store to 150k+ downloads.
By September 2014, after years of attempts, I finally passed the Google interview and joined the YouTube team as an iOS software engineer coding primarily in Objective-C and Python. In my 3.5 years there, I was promoted to the Tech Lead of App Architecture, helping the YouTube iOS app achieve rank #1 in the Apple App Store with 150+ million users.
By 2018, I launched the TechLead YouTube channel as a hobby, pioneering the tech influencer space with a blend of insights on tech and comedy. The TechLead character is a persona purpose-built for YouTube, yet based on real-life experiences. TechLead entertains audiences with satire, wit, trolling, and chases trending topics yet all the while delivering real knowledge about the tech industry. Through a blend of the YouTube persona with actual experiences, TechLead weaves attention-grabbing entertainment with nuggets of wisdom on tech, finance, and lifestyle.
By May 2018, I joined Meta as a staff software engineer in the Facebook Video team developing in iOS and PHP. I joined Instagram Ads briefly coding in Python, before a conflict of interest arose with my YouTube channel. I returned to my entrepreneurial endeavors.
By 2019, I finally went fulltime on YouTube. The channel has achieved 150+ million views worldwide over 500+ videos, and partnered with sponsors and brands. Alongside the channel, the Tech Interview Pro interview training program helps aspiring software engineers pass interviews to land jobs.
I remain a student of life and continue to explore the frontiers.
Hobbies
I like my dog, traveling, gaming, photography, sailing, sci-fi, coffee, lifestyle design, and learning.
Resume
Social Media
