About
About
Hi, I'm Jiwoo, from Korea and based in Hong Kong. Welcome to my free space.
This is where I share the things I'm into. I love craft and machinery, and things that are made well and last for decades, over anything built for a short hype. Analog machines especially, because you have to talk to them with your hands.
I pull espresso on a La Pavoni lever machine. Nothing about it is automatic; it's a solid, all-mechanical thing you run entirely by hand. I used to shoot film and now use a Fujifilm digital camera that keeps the same feel, all dials and clicks. I also love drinking tea, and I keep a Chinese teaware set and about ten years' worth of tea at home. I cook, I love good kitchenware, and one of my more meditative habits is sharpening my knives on a slow Sunday morning. As a kid I won a line-tracer robotics championship; at fifteen I built my own speaker; I DJed through school.
For work, I turned a research NLP model into a deployed fintech product at HKUST, then spent two years as the systems-and-operations person behind a small sports-recovery studio.
Hope you enjoy your time here. My contact is in the bottom-right corner of the site, so feel free to email me about anything, especially work and collaborations.
Projects
Things I’ve built and run.
Professional
The Korean Sports Association in Hong Kong sends a delegation to Korea's National Sports Festival each year, and every document used to funnel through the same two or three of us. I redrew who does what, then built the service around it: participants get one link, no app or account, with instant photo quality checks; the organizing team gets a submission dashboard and a roster-final button; and the committee's official Excel templates fill themselves for the whole delegation from one click. Next.js, Supabase, Vercel.
HKUST fintech research project turning FinBERT NLP sentiment analysis into a deployed web product, covering filings across SEC EDGAR, HKEX, and China. I owned the data pipeline and three-schema database architecture, and ran delivery over the build team.
Wisers-HKUST Tourism Index site: a server-rendered Node.js and Express app with MongoDB and Chart.js, publishing a predictive tourism-demand index.
HKUST Analytics Challenge site: a React front-end pulling content over GraphQL from a Strapi CMS.
A small sports-recovery studio in Tsim Sha Tsui with no ops function. I built the systems it ran on: a Forms.app to Zapier to Notion intake pipeline, outcome data collection, and a human-in-the-loop reminder bot.
Personal
Private Cantonese home-dinner site. Guests browse the weekly menu, RSVP with what they'll bring, and request dishes. The host runs the dish catalog and weekly menu from a passphrase-gated /kitchen admin. Built on Next.js, Supabase, Cloudinary.
Upcoming Hong Kong whisky price tracker across ~10 HK online shops, normalizing listings to canonical bottle IDs and flagging good prices against rolling 30/90-day medians. Telegram bot first, web app later.
A two-minute morning practice I built for myself and still use. Breathe with the circle, then walk through seven affirmations one at a time, with a recap at the end. Nothing is stored, so every morning starts fresh. One self-contained HTML file, no build step and no dependencies.