Welcome to Jiannan's Homepage!
Hello everyone! My name is Jiannan Yang(杨建楠). I live in Atlanta with my beautiful wife and two dogs.
I am a software engineer at Google, currently working for the Spanner team. Spanner is a distributed database service provided by Google. Before working, I was a Ph.D. student at Peking University, majoring in Theoretical Computer Science.
I love dogs very much, and I have an Australian shepherd and a golden retriever at home. I have a Youtube channel with some shorts of my dogs. I am a fan of the Argentina national football team. Congrats to them for winning the 2022 World Cup. I am a pilot, with a private pilot license, mainly flying in the greater Atlanta Area, based at KLZU.
Furthermore, I always appear in games and on social websites with the nickname "songhuadan88" and an avatar from a famous mobile game Doodle Jump, if I am not using my real name. So, it is not difficult to find me if I have registered.
I can speak Chinese, English, some Japanese, and very very limited German.
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Experience
I was born in June 1992, in the beautiful city of Harbin, which is famous for its ice and snow culture. And I went to primary school from Sept. 1998 to Jul. 2003, possibly after one-year preschool education, which I cannot remember clearly. Then I went to junior middle school from Sept. 2003 to Jul. 2007 and senior middle school from Sept. 2007 to Jul. 2010. During the last year of my senior middle school, I was the monitor of my class, which still remains the most powerful position that I have ever taken up. With a good grade in the NCEE, I went to Peking University to study computer science, first as an undergraduate student, from Sept. 2010 to Jul. 2014, and then as a Ph.D. student, from Sept. 2014 to Jul. 2019, during which I went to UCLA as a visiting Ph.D. student in Oct. 2017, and returned to Peking University in Oct. 2018. After graduation, I finished my student career and began to work at Google Munich from Aug. 2019. Then I transferred to Sunnyvale, United States, but still working at Google, from Aug. 2021. From Nov. 2022 to Mar. 2023, I temporarily moved to Atlanta area to stay with my girlfriend and returned to California afterwards. From Dec. 2023, I permanently moved to Atlanta area. I married a beautiful lady on Jul. 1, 2024, at San Francisco city hall.
I would like to add some sentences on my nickname "songhuadan88". It has been a long time since I took the nickname and I do not know exactly how long, either, but most people, even some of my best friends, do not know the exact meaning of my nickname. The former part "songhuadan" is the pinyin form of "松花蛋", which is a Chinese word which means a kind of food, Century Egg. Actually, I do not like this food and rarely eat it. But why would I take this nickname? Haha, who knows? Sometimes, I will register myself at websites, like Microsoft, using the family name "Song" and the given name "Huadan". It is not difficult to find that this is a separation of my nickname, but since "松花蛋" is a complete word in Chinese, this is not quite correct. Then, to the latter part "88", one may think that its meaning is "eighty-eight", but it is not. In fact, it means "father", because in Chinese, "father" sounds like "ba ba" (which is pronounced like "88"). So, this is all I want to say, and my nickname "songhuadan88" means "the Father of Century Egg".