About
One long page about myself, written with no need for it to be useful.
Hi — I'm Ân. I build software, take photographs, and write when I feel like sharing something. Some day this small site may be all that's left of me, so I'd rather it sound like a person than a résumé.
Everything below is honest, unhurried, and certain to change. For almost anything on this page, the opposite is probably also true on a different day — I don't fully trust what I tell myself. It isn't a lie; it's just my truth at the time.
Timeline, for context
A beginning
Born in Việt Nam, into a house full of noise and good food.
First line of code
An afternoon with Pascal, then a small student competition in algorithms. It didn't stick — not yet.
Physics over code
Traded programming for physics, chasing a city-wide student competition. Came third.
First camera
A Canon EOS M10, picked up the same year — the start of an on-and-off habit.
Into the specialized class
Tested into the physics track at the province's top school. Ranked second.
Everything but studying
Most of high school went to friends, love, and clubs — in roughly that order of importance.
One hard year
Grade 12, finally serious. Third prize at the national physics olympiad.
INSA Huế, by chance
Found INSA Huế almost by accident, with studying abroad as the real dream. Enrolled anyway.
Back to programming
Picked code back up. Entered two national student programming competitions — walked away with an encouragement award, humbly earned.
France
Left Huế after two years, and Việt Nam with it — for France.
Cybersecurity, then a drift
Studied computer science hard at INSA Centre Val de Loire, Bourges — mostly cybersecurity. It never quite fit. Drifted toward frontend instead.
Noota
Landed a fourth-year internship there. Stayed on.
Alternance
One last year — apprenticeship now, splitting time between work and school.
A new camera
Lost the Canon somewhere along the way. Replaced it with a Fujifilm — different system, same habit.
Vietnam made me
I grew up there, and it never really left. The warm rain, the early markets, the aimless motorbike rides through the city. Breakfast was never the same thing twice — whatever my parents happened to buy on the way, whatever I grabbed running late for school. Nothing planned, and somehow it always worked out.
Nobody in my family talked much about how they felt. It didn't need saying — you just understood it from how much they did without asking for anything back. I think that's where I get it: showing up matters more than announcing it, and effort is just something you do quietly, not something you talk about.
I left in 2023 and don't know when I'll be back for good. But on a worldwide spectrum, I'm still very much a product of one small province in central Vietnam — Bình Định, not Hà Nội, not Sài Gòn. Meaning:
- — resilient by necessity, not by choice — the kind of place where storms and drought taught you to expect little and make do
- — thrifty, almost stubbornly so, even now that I don't have to be
- — quiet about effort, loud about nothing
- — community first — if a neighbor's roof came off in a storm, the street showed up, nobody had to ask
- — proud of a home most people outside Vietnam have never heard of
- — suspicious of loud confidence — if you're actually good at something, it shows without you saying so
- — warm to guests, slower to trust strangers
I'd rather try many things than master one
I've never been good at staying in one lane. Code, photos, language, sport, whatever's in front of me — I want a taste of most of it. Being decent at several things has always felt more useful to me than being excellent at exactly one.
It shows up in the small stuff too — a new storage system, a new way of shipping code, a setting on the camera I haven't tried yet. I'm not loyal to any one stack or method; I just want to know what else is out there.
It probably means I'll never be the deepest expert in a single room. I've made peace with that trade.
I understand enough to move, then I move
I like knowing how things work under the hood — but I don't wait for that understanding to be complete. Most of what I've learned, at work or with a camera in hand, came from building something imperfect first and fixing it as I went.
More about me
Only dead fish go with the flow. If who I am isn't getting me what I want, I'd rather change than sit around blaming my nature for it.
Silence doesn't calm me — noise does. A dead-quiet room puts me on edge; a café hum, some background chatter, that's when my head actually settles.
My head doesn't idle. Empty time still gets spent — on old conversations, on what a story was actually trying to say, on trying to feel a situation from someone else's side.
Closed captions, my friends call it. Whatever I'm feeling shows on my face in real time — I don't hide the uneasy or the annoyed, so you'll know before I say anything.
I'll hear out any controversial idea. But actual confrontation — raised voices, someone trying to win instead of talk — I'm out. Disagreement's fine. Conflict isn't.
I've quit most things worth quitting. Smoking, weed, drinking past one glass, video games — all gone. Social media's still undefeated.
Most of my closest friends are women. Just not new ones, not since uni — guy-girl friendships stopped staying just friendships. Guys' nights are fun, but they don't go as deep.
I pick a film sim and just shoot. No real process — the fun's in not overthinking it.
I care about a handful of things, but a lot of small ones too. Depth in a few, curiosity about most everything else.