About

I’m Jia. I came to Perth as an international student. These days, my life includes enterprise AI, teaching, community, long-distance cycling and motherhood. This site is where I collect what I’m making, noticing and trying to understand.

Curiosity

Most of the interesting parts of my life started with a question, an unfamiliar room, or something I wanted to try before I knew whether I would be good at it.

I like following an idea far enough to discover something unexpected. Sometimes it becomes useful work. Sometimes it simply changes how I see things.

I’m learning to leave room for both.

Work

I build enterprise AI systems, which means working with technology and with the people and organisations trying to make it useful.

I’m drawn to the unfinished parts: questions without an obvious answer, problems that cross disciplines, things we need to imagine before we can engineer them.

I care about doing this work well. But I am becoming less interested in achievement for its own sake.

I want to build things that matter without accidentally building a life I am too busy to live.

Community

For me, community building means holding a space where other people can thrive.

One of the most rewarding parts is watching someone learn something they didn’t know before, then go on to build an entire project themselves.

I also remember a message from someone thanking me for helping him settle into Perth and feel welcome in the AI community. Having once arrived here as an international student myself, that meant a lot.

Those moments are why I keep bringing people together: to make room for questions, for trying something unfamiliar, and for finding people to learn alongside.

What grows from there belongs to them, too.

Ambition and becoming

I have always had plenty of ambition. These days, I’m learning to be more deliberate about what I give it to.

Motherhood belongs in this story, alongside the work and everything else. It does not need to become a lesson about leadership to earn its place here.

I want to stay curious without chasing every possibility. To build deeply, change my mind when I need to, and recognise when doing more would mean being less present.

I’m still figuring out what that looks like in practice.

Roots and home

I come from people, places, languages and histories that travel with me wherever I go. They give me somewhere to return to without deciding everywhere I can go next.

One evening, my partner and I cooked together, enjoyed a quiet night at home, and watched Project Hail Mary. I remember feeling so happy just being there together. The film left me thinking about friendship and how much it can mean to have someone beside you.

I used to think adventure had to happen somewhere else. Now I think the world can open almost anywhere.

The world is still enormous even when you stay still.

Life

Apparently, a playground.

Some structures are meant to be climbed. Some rules are worth questioning. Some games only appear after you invent them.

There will be wrong turns and things that never become what I imagined. There will always be more possibilities than one life can hold.

I don’t need to pursue all of them.

I want to remain curious enough to begin before certainty arrives, and present enough to notice the life happening while I’m figuring things out.

Maybe that is what a life well lived means to me.

Not being remembered by everyone.
Remembering that I lived it.