Hi there. I’m Youwen. I study math and computer science at UC Santa Barbara.

I’m a member of the MIT OpenCompute Laboratory and benevolent dictator at functor.systems.

Here is my GitHub, university transcript, CV/resume, and a picture of my cats.

I am interested in the nPOV and how we can apply higher structures to solve hard problems. In general, I prefer to use free-as-in-freedom software. I developed functorOS, an experimental NixOS-based Linux distribution—among other free software contributions.

I like hacking, and hackathons. Most recently, I won the grand prize at HackMIT 2025. This year I am organizing SB Hacks, the headliner hackathon of UC Santa Barbara.

In my spare time, I play guitar and spend too much money on guitar pedals. I listen to a lot of music.

See about for more about myself, or now for what I’m up to right now. Or explore the other pages on this website.

Is the world alive, is it a single living thing? If it is, in the sense I meant, then its primary job is to survive, and to survive it’ll have to make decisions. So there I was in my living room thinking, “oh my god, we’ve got to steer this thing!”
— David Spivak