About

My name is Tean, and my Chinese name is 黎天明. "Tean" is translated from "天".

I was born in 2004, in New Jersey. From 2006-2008, I lived in Macau, China, before moving back to the US. I can somewhat speak Cantonese. In 2nd grade, I moved to the suburbs of Philly, Pennsylvania, where I lived before attending college in Ithaca, New York.

I started programming around 5th grade, writing programs in QBasic. Soon after, I picked up Python and Ti-Basic (the Ti-84's programming language).

I'm interested in computer science, especially programming languages and systems.

Outside of school and work, I enjoy playing guitar, playing video games, watching anime, occassionally playing with yoyos and butterfly knives, and tinkering with open-source software. I used to play the violin too, but it's not very apartment-friendly.

About this site

This site is mostly static, outside of some embedded elements like Google Slides and YouTube videos.

I do not doing anything with cookies.

I value privacy and security. However, I am using Cloudflare to host this site, and am unsure if they do anything suspicious.

Why make a blog?

My blog is primarily about my life's imperfections. Writing about my imperfections serve the following purposes:

  1. It helps me identify parts of my life to improve.
  2. Sharing in public pressures me to remain accountable.
  3. Others may be able to learn from my imperfections.

Favorite Games

Origin of My Name

My father and mother are from Hong Kong and Shanghai respectively. Since Hong Kong speaks Cantonese rather than Mandarin, my name 黎天明 is pronounced "lie teen ming" instead of "lee tian ming". Note that these romanizations are written to be more intuitive for English speakers, the accurate jyutping and pinyin are "lai4 tin1 ming4" and "li2 tian1 ming2", respectively.

My name was spelled "tean" to resemble "dean", in hopes the similarity will help Americans pronounce my name correctly. However, I observed the pattern to be very common amongst my teachers upon the first roll call:

"Let me guess... 'teen'. Wait no, 'tian'."

What I think is happening is that "teen" IS the intuitive pronunciation because of its resemblance to "Dean" and "team". However, because teachers are often mindful of alternative pronunciations for foreign names, they unnecessarily correct themselves in this instance.