Eric Thong is a Senior Optical System Engineer based in San Jose with 11 years of hands-on experience spanning optical hardware, embedded systems, and software engineering. He has worked at high‑impact companies including ByteDance, Uber, and Google[x], and brings a hybrid hardware-software perspective from roles as a hardware engineer and former software engineer/co‑founder. Eric contributes to open source front-end projects—most notably a Chrome extension that forces H.264 playback on YouTube—demonstrating pragmatic problem solving that improves real‑world UX and device battery behavior. A Stanford Computer Science graduate, he excels at translating system-level requirements into deployable optics and firmware solutions and often bridges gaps between prototype hardware and production software.
11 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Bachelor's degree, Computer Science at Stanford University
A Chrome extension that makes YouTube stream H.264 videos instead of VP8/VP9 videos
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Contributions:34 commits, 9 PRs, 41 pushes in 4 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Eric primarily contributed to the development of a Chrome extension that modifies how YouTube streams videos. They implemented core features by modifying the existing Javascript code to override video element properties and media source extensions. The user refactored the code and added a new options page to provide users with settings such as enabling/disabling the extension and blocking 60fps video. The developer also added a feature to enable the extension only when the device is running on battery.
Contributions:16 commits, 4 PRs, 13 pushes in 1 year 8 months
firefoxvp8vp9videoswebextension
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Eric Thong - Senior Optical System Engineer at ByteDance