About this site

ZiCode records the workbench of a programmer who still writes code.

I am Alex Xiang, a software engineer who has spent many years building systems, shipping products, debugging production issues, and working with teams in both large companies and startups.

These days I focus on AI engineering, agent tooling, developer productivity, local language models, data products, and practical software systems. This blog keeps the decisions, trade-offs, code, failures, and lessons from real work.

Current update date: July 6, 2026

Alex Xiang
Alex Xiang Engineer, still building

What I Write About

Most articles come from hands-on work: why a feature was designed in a certain way, why a tool works or fails, why a deployment is slow, or whether a model is actually usable on local hardware.

  • AI-assisted development: Codex, Cursor, Claude Code, OpenClaw, and agent workflows.
  • Local model practice: WSL, CUDA, Ollama, llama.cpp, multimodal testing, and real usage limits.
  • Engineering and product: backend services, automation, CI/CD, observability, and production operations.
  • Quant trading: building an A-share quant platform from data and factors to backtests and paper trading.

Who This Blog Is For

If you care less about ten-minute framework demos and more about how systems become maintainable, verifiable, and shippable, these notes should be useful.

I try to keep commands, configuration, screenshots, results, and failure modes whenever they matter.

Content Map

AI and Agents Putting AI tools into real development workflows. Local Model Practice Installation, hardware limits, inference performance, multimodal capabilities, and boundaries. Quant Trading Practice Data, strategies, backtests, and paper trading from a programmer's angle. All Posts Browse the full archive, including migrated notes and recent articles.