My name is Jimmy Lai and I'm a French software engineer currently living in Munich, Germany.

I recently joined Vercel ▲, where I work on Next.js, a fairly popular open source framework for web development built on top of React.

Before that, I spent 3 years working at Meta, where I was lucky enough to contribute to projects like React Native, Facebook.com and Workplace.com.

Read more about my work here.

The main constant in my career is that I've been blessed to work on web performance for relatively large scale projects.

That type of work has allowed me to explore the breadth of the web performance spectrum: from investigating HTTP connection issues to optimizing client-side rendering, I've had a lot of fun trying to make websites fast.

My focus lies on making pleasant tools. It's not only about making things quick: it's about respecting the user's time and resources.

When I'm not working, I enjoy cooking and eating (too much). I'm also a fairly big cinema fan. When I read, I mostly enjoy noir books and comic books. I also do some amateur photography and digital painting, which you can see more of here.

This site was built on Next.js 13 and Tailwind. The photography section is powered by Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR), which allows me to keep the page static (and fast) whilst still being "dynamic" enough. I can upload pictures from my phone via an Apple Shorcut, which then trigger a rebuild of the page, all in the span of a few seconds.