About

I’m Yi Xie / 谢熠, a writer, independent researcher, and software engineer based in Vancouver. My writing has included fiction, criticism, and essays on film, comics, and culture. Rainy Day Bakery, my long-running writing site, holds much of that earlier work.

Over time, my nonfiction has become increasingly research-intensive, with recent work focusing on natural history and extinction. My first book, 《鸟儿永不归来》, tells the stories of nine extinct bird species and is my most substantial completed work to date. I also maintain Extinction Archives, an independent natural-history project.

I have several years of professional software engineering experience, including at AWS, spanning databases, data systems, cloud infrastructure, and backend and full-stack development. This technical background continues to shape how I approach information, systems, evidence, and complex research questions. I hold a master’s degree in electrical and computer engineering from Georgia Tech. I completed a research-based master’s in computer science at Simon Fraser University, where I spent about two years as a research assistant in the Database Systems Lab.

Much of my public writing to date has been in Chinese. I work extensively with both Chinese- and English-language sources.

谢熠，作者、独立研究者、软件工程师，现居温哥华。写作涉及小说、评论，以及电影、漫画与文化等题材，长期维护写作网站「雨中面包店」。近年来，他的非虚构写作更多建立在深入的资料研究之上，近期关注自然史与灭绝问题。第一本书《鸟儿永不归来》讲述九种近现代灭绝鸟类的故事；他也维护自然史项目「绝迹志」。

他有数年的专业软件工程经历，包括在 AWS 的工作，涉及数据库、数据系统、云基础设施及前后端开发。这些经验持续影响着他处理信息、系统、证据与复杂研究问题的方式。他拥有佐治亚理工学院电气与计算机工程硕士学位，并在西蒙菲莎大学完成了研究型计算机科学硕士学位，在该校数据库系统实验室担任研究助理约两年。迄今公开写作主要使用中文，研究中广泛使用中英文资料。