Toomore Chiang

Work

Selected projects from twelve years of backend engineering and open-source work. Full dates are in my resume.

Open Culture Foundation

Project technical lead, November 2022 to September 2026. A Taiwanese non-profit working on open source culture, open data and digital rights.

Shield of Self-Defense: an open security curriculum

Led the revamp of OCF's openly licensed (CC-BY 4.0) security curriculum for civil-society organizations. Restructured it into eight chapters, from threat modeling and device hardening to encrypted communication and overseas-travel checklists, rebuilt the site on MkDocs and set up deployment to ssd.ocf.tw. Also built a gamified 3D version in Three.js, with a WebGPU variant, where each chapter becomes an explorable "security ruin" cleared through turn-based quiz battles.

Security accompaniment for human-rights defenders

Led on-site security training and implementation for six high-risk civil-society organizations and human-rights-defender groups, using long-term accompaniment instead of one-off workshops: endpoint and device checks, day-to-day security processes, and internal security policies written for non-technical teams. The curriculum was published openly as SSD for continued self-study.

Open source localization platform

Built and operated a Weblate-based translation platform, with its testing and deployment infrastructure, so translators could localize open-source software into Traditional Chinese online. Coordinated training, workshops and community internships across projects such as Element (Matrix), IRMA/Yivi and GOV.UK Notify/Forms.

OONI Research in Taiwan

Worked with the global OONI community on internet-censorship and surveillance research in Taiwan, co-published the first local report with findings and recommendations, and translated the measurement methodology for civil-society stakeholders.

Taiwan's open source communities at FOSDEM

Coordinated a multi-year effort bringing Taiwanese open-source communities to FOSDEM, Europe's largest open source conference: speaker logistics, content curation and partnership building with European projects.

Community and independent

2025–nowCo-organizer

anoni.net, the anonymous network community

A community initiative on personal privacy, campus Tor relays and anonymous payments. I see the last two as complementary: Tor hides who you connect to, and anonymous payments hide who you pay. I maintain the documentation site (MkDocs Material) and three webtunnel Tor bridges for the community, and am organizing a two-day track at COSCUP 2026 with the Taipei Ethereum community.

2025–nowPersonal project

A self-hosted weekly digest pipeline

Pulls feeds from a self-hosted FreshRSS, summarizes them with LLM APIs and publishes digests to Mastodon and WordPress, with Radicale (CalDAV) feeding calendar-aware planning. Runs in production every day.

2018–2024COSCUP

COSCUP Volunteer and Subscribe

Built and maintained for more than five years the volunteer onboarding platform and the subscription system used by COSCUP staff and over 7,000 subscribers, on Flask, Celery, FastAPI and AWS EC2/SES with Google Workspace, Mattermost and Telegram integrations. Both are AGPL-3.0 and were deliberately sunset in 2024.

Appier

Senior Backend Engineer II, 2015–2022.

2019–2022Internal Platform team (IT/MIS)

MIS-Workspace: automating internal operations

The problem. Administration, finance and IT ran much of their work by hand, across systems that did not talk to each other: moving data into SAP, handling leave requests, creating and removing accounts when people joined or left, and counting equipment. The same steps came back for every new hire, every departure and every month.

What I built. I led development of MIS-Workspace, an internal platform that tied six-plus systems, including GSuite, SuccessFactors, Slack, Jira, Bitwarden, VPN and Falcon endpoint security, into one directory and provisioning workflow. Joining and leaving became a single flow that creates or removes accounts across those systems. Leave requests, equipment inventory and the exchange of administration and finance data with SAP were automated. It was written in Python against each system’s API, with Celery and RabbitMQ running the jobs on a schedule and retrying them automatically when a system failed to respond. Colleagues outside engineering used all of it through simple web pages, and an employee information page brought assets, group memberships and department data into one view.

The result. Finance and administration work that used to take at least a week shrank to a single afternoon the teams could schedule together. In IT, the slow, repetitive jobs moved to scheduled automation, so the team worked at a steadier pace instead of stopping for routine chores, and troubleshooting got faster because the information was finally in one place.

Retargeting data pipeline

Owned the Spark-to-bloom-filter pipeline behind retargeting audience inference, and improved throughput by reimplementing the topic-list and user-session join with Go goroutines.