I build healthcare platforms that can't afford to fail — and grow the teamsmy favorite part! behind them.
I build scalable platforms and lead engineering teams that ship products people rely on. Over 14 years, I've worked across healthcare, e-commerce, and sports tech — always focused on systems that last.
An AI grocery receipt scanner and expense tracker I designed, built, and shipped to the App Store and Google Play. Point your camera at a receipt — get clean, categorized spending insights instantly.
Follow on Product Hunt →Watch the iOS & Android demos →
Production-ready systems, where AI meets enterprise infrastructure.
I'm Xinjiang — a Principal Software Engineer specializing in large-scale healthcare digital platforms: patient scheduling, analytics, and compliance-sensitive web experiences. My focus is building production-ready systems that bridge modern AI capabilities with enterprise infrastructure — and sharing what I learn along the way.
Today I'm a Principal Engineer at The Aspen Group, driving architectural modernization across healthcare brands like Aspen Dental, ClearChoice, WellNow, LoVet, and Chapter. Before that I built e-commerce platforms at Peapod Digital Labs powering grocery chains used by millions, and earlier built PrepHero from scratch at EXACT Sports.
What drives me is learning new technologies while solving real-world problems — and growing an engineering team from five to thirty-plus without losing the quality bar.
Impact across three very different worlds.
The same instincts — scale, accessibility, and systems that last — applied wherever the problem is real.
Healthcare
Patient portals, dental practice management, and HIPAA-compliant systems across Aspen Dental, ClearChoice, WellNow, LoVet, and Chapter.
E-Commerce
Online grocery platforms serving 20M+ users — GraphQL middleware, cart optimization, and checkout flows for major US chains.
Sports Tech
PrepHero, built from scratch — an athlete recruitment and camp-registration platform connecting athletes, coaches, and college programs.
Four positions I'll defend.
Not values — decisions. Each one came out of a replatform, an on-call rotation, or a roadmap fight, and each links to the post where I argue it.
Titles don't define leadership — trust and competence do.
I led five brand teams before I had a single direct report. Influence came from being the go-to on the system, tying every technical call to a business outcome, and refusing the "do it all" trap in favor of delegation and shared ownership.
Leading without authority →Share packages, not applications.
Three years modernizing five healthcare brands taught me where the boundary goes: share infrastructure, the API layer, and code — own the deployable. Consolidate first, run it long enough to see the coupling, then split apps, not packages.
The three-year write-up →Build the systems that build systems.
Vendor matrices, a public technology radar, one observability standard across every brand. Not because the tools matter, but because alignment happens when every team sees the same metrics and the same trade-offs.
The principal's toolbox →Inside a product org, engineering's job is translation.
A technical bet and a governance bet shouldn't compete for the same roadmap slot with the same estimate. Name which instinct a proposal came from — top-down portfolio or bottom-up problem — before you review it.
Notes from the product summit →Where the lessons came from.
MS in Computer Science, University of Illinois at Chicago · BS, Dalian Polytechnic University.
Principal Engineer
The Aspen GroupLeading architectural modernization across TAG's five healthcare brands — 1,400+ locations in 48 states — and a 30+ engineer team as lead of all technical leaders. Spearheading AI in the web space, starting with the first MCP servers for Aspen Dental and ClearChoice appointment scheduling in December 2025, plus an Auth0 + MFA identity platform and observability standards on Sentry, Grafana, and OpenTelemetry. Since March 2026, also owning the clinical-facing mobile apps used in offices, including Aspen Tx Navigator, Aspen Forms and Aspen Scan, and adding Rilla to record in-office consultations.
Lead Software Engineer
The Aspen GroupRebuilt the Commercial Web platform and founded the Digital Commerce Platform — a multi-tenant, scalable architecture. Led the Gatsby→Next.js migration that launched WellNow, hit green Core Web Vitals for ClearChoice, and scaled the team from <5 to 20+.
Principal / Senior Software Engineer
Peapod Digital LabsArchitected GraphQL middleware for an online-grocery platform serving millions. Drove web-accessibility standards, performance, and code-quality improvements while mentoring senior and mid-level engineers.
Software Engineer
PeapodBuilt customer-facing features for Peapod's online grocery platform, drove the web-accessibility (WCAG 2.0 AA) work, wrote for the Peapod Engineering blog, and organized the internal hackathons.
Full Stack Software Engineer
EXACT SportsBuilt PrepHero from scratch — a camp-registration and athletic-recruiting platform connecting athletes, coaches, and college programs, with payments and user management serving thousands.
A few things I'm proud of.
Digital Commerce Platform
Architected the foundation of a multi-tenant, scalable commerce platform and led the Gatsby→Next.js migration that launched WellNow — TAG's first multi-tenant application.
bogyman
A single-binary Rust CLI that tells you which of your Claude Code and Codex sessions is waiting on you, on what, and for how long. Hooks push events into a local SQLite file; nothing leaves your machine.
Tinycap
A native macOS menu-bar screen recorder and screenshot tool. Record a window, screen or area to a small MP4, WebM or GIF, or mark up a screenshot. Signed, notarized, on Homebrew, and in App Review.
Green Core Web Vitals
Drove the performance work that took key healthcare brands to green Core Web Vitals — measured, enforced, and held.
PRISM — White-Label Grocery Platform
Six store brands plus Peapod on one omnichannel engine — a strangler migration off Oracle ATG, 40+ engineers across four pillars, 20M+ weekly shoppers.
Phoenix — AI-Native Personal Platform
This very site, rebuilt from a static Hugo blog into an AI-native Next.js platform — three models behind one SDK, an integrated chat assistant, and full English/Chinese support.
Thinking out loud, on the record.
The work I most want to be known for — notes from where architecture meets the people who maintain it.
The Blog
Deep dives into system architecture, engineering practices, and lessons learned building scalable products — with the occasional detour into life beyond the terminal.
Read the blog →Think Inside of the Box
A podcast of in-depth audio articles on technology, software engineering, and career development. Perfect for the commute or the run.
Listen now →Speaking & Talks
Conference and lightning talks on healthcare platforms, performance, and AI in the web space. Based in Chicago, available for 2026 events in person or virtually.
Email for a CFP →❝What colleagues sayXinjiang was one of the best developers at our company--he was always the go-to person for our design team when we had questions, simple or complex. We knew he'd always be willing to work with us to find the answer. I'd love the opportunity to work with him again in the future.
— Christine Oh · Product Design Leader, Asana
Let's build something together.I read every message.
Whether you're untangling a gnarly architecture problem, planning a conference talk, or just want to swap notes on building healthcare platforms — I'm always up for a good conversation. Drop me a line.