Bofan Wang (王博凡), also known as Jaspr, is a backend engineer on Shopee's e-commerce search team in Singapore, working mostly in Go. He came to engineering from product and interaction design, and still designs for fun.
Works on the backend of Shopee's e-commerce search in Singapore, mostly in Go. The job in one line: take what people type, work out what they mean, find the right products and put them in the right order, before the page feels slow.
His older site, in Chinese, from the product and design years: essays on recommendation, gray releases, community products and onboarding, plus a few technical notes.
His GitHub, since 2013: 41 public repositories. The most-starred one is not about search: ColorCorrection, colour-correcting photos with a standard colour card (Python, 40 stars). Recent repos are agent and smart-glasses tooling.
An essay arguing that every personalised feed, shop and community app should ship an incognito mode, because a click is weaker evidence of interest than a recommender assumes. Written before he worked on search, and still his view.
bofan.wangbofan.wang › interests › agents
AI agents
Wiring language models to real tools, then checking what they actually finished, not what they said they did.
Why a home page is a search engine, how the tiny engine works, the colours and fonts, the menu, and the details hidden around the page.
bofan.wangbofan.wang › interests › wearables
Smart glasses and wearables
Computers you wear instead of hold. Mostly smart glasses, where the hard part is a ranking question: what deserves a glance, and what should stay in your pocket.
bofan.wangbofan.wang › interests › gadgets
Gadgets and smart home
If a device has an API, it will probably end up in an automation.
He used to complain that the apps he used most were badly designed. The more he talked to ordinary users, the less he believed design alone could carry a product. A 2017 essay.