Shared chapter
Chan Nguyen
Founder, Spartan · Early Bird engineer
Relationship
How we worked together
Chan and I officially joined Bird on the same day. He is one of the best engineers I have ever worked with, and we collaborated across internal platforms and hackathons throughout our time there. We probably argued more than anyone else on the engineering team, but those arguments consistently led to productive discoveries and better product decisions.
Influence
What I learned
I learned an enormous amount from Chan about performance engineering and scaling applications to millions of users. He also reinforced that strong technical disagreement, grounded in trust and rigor, can be one of the most productive tools an engineering team has.
Projects
Projects we built together
Bird · 2018 – 2025
My story at Bird
Chan and I joined Bird on the same day. He helped lay the company's original technical foundation using then-emerging tools such as Kotlin and Dropwizard, and his instincts for performance and scale influenced many of the systems we built as Bird grew.
Read the case studyBird · 2018 – 2025
Habitat — Bird’s geospatial operating system
Chan and I worked together on Habitat as it grew into foundational infrastructure for Bird. Our technical debates were often intense, but they repeatedly exposed better approaches and helped us arrive at stronger architecture and product decisions.
Read the case studyBird · Hackathon
Bird Flight Simulator — a virtual fleet for real platform testing
The Flight Simulator was one of several internal projects and hackathons Chan and I worked on together. His performance and systems instincts helped shape how we approached building tools against Bird's production-scale mobility platform.
Read the case studyThemes
The work we shared
Elsewhere