Mengdi Chen
Staff Software Engineer at Normal Computing
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMengdi Chen is a Staff Software Engineer with 12 years of experience building and scaling front-end platforms and developer tooling, now focused on turning ML research into production-grade AI products. A former React core-team contributor and lead of React Developer Tooling at Meta, she has deep expertise in React ecosystem projects like Recoil and notable open-source work on facebook/react and mobx-state-tree. She has a track record of modernizing large codebases and teams—leading a zero-production-bug rewrite of a major advertising UI and introducing a GraphQL API gateway to improve UI-server efficiency. At Normal Computing she built Fuji-Web, a web AI agent that bridges ML work and user-facing products. Based in New York, she blends hands-on engineering with team growth, DevX improvements, and a genuine passion for OSS that often leads her to tackle subtle debugging and tooling challenges others avoid.
12 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor’s Degree, Digital Arts, Bachelor’s Degree, Digital Arts at Communication University of ChinaMaster's Degree, Information Science, Master's Degree, Information Science at Cornell University
English, Chinese
Github Skills (24)
mobx-state-tree10
javascript10
front-end-development10
build-automation10
state-management10
frontend10
react10
browser-extension9
react-native9
debugging9
cicd9
chrome-extension9
chrome-app9
rollupjs9
chrome-plugin9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
react/react
Apr 2016 - Jan 2023
The library for web and native user interfaces.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:94 reviews, 53 commits, 92 PRs in 6 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Mengdi primarily contributed to the React codebase, focusing on debugging and improving the React DevTools. Their work included addressing errors in the DevTools, specifically those related to inspecting user components and handling unsupported hooks. The user also implemented changes to the DevTools' user interface and error handling to provide a better user experience. Furthermore, the user improved the browser extension by improving script injection logic.
user-interfacereactjavascript-libraryjavascriptdeclarative
facebookexperimental/Recoil
May 2020 - Aug 2022
Recoil is an experimental state management library for React apps. It provides several capabilities that are difficult to achieve with React alone, while being compatible with the newest features of React.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:11 reviews, 63 commits, 66 PRs in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Mengdi primarily contributed to the Recoil library, focusing on fixing bugs, improving the build process, and refactoring code. Their work included addressing synchronization issues, fixing global variables, and merging utility functions. They also updated build configurations for React Native and other environments, and introduced changes to support multiple packages.
reactstate-management
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