Hello, I'm Patrick Urbanke (劉自成), and welcome to my GitHub profile!

I spent 10 years living in Asia, which is why I have a Chinese name and my GitHub handle is liuzicheng1987. Currently, I reside in Munich, Germany. I am fluent in English, Mandarin Chinese, and German, and I'm happy to communicate in any of these languages.

I hold a doctoral degree, with my dissertation focusing on machine learning.

I am the co-founder of Code17, where we develop getML, an advanced tool for automated feature engineering on relational data and time series.

Additionally, I am the main author of reflect-cpp, a C++ library for serialisation, deserialisation, and validation through reflection. This library is akin to Python's Pydantic or Rust's serde, offering powerful and flexible solutions for C++ developers.

I am a strong proponent of functional programming and am greatly influenced by theoretical constructs such as category theory and type theory. One of my favourite books on programming is Category Theory for Programmers by Bartosz Milewski.

Outside of coding, I enjoy reading, particularly on topics like history, politics, language, and, of course, computer science. I also enjoy reading novels, with some of my favourite books being "Animal Farm" and "Homage to Catalonia" by George Orwell, and "Die Revolution entlässt ihre Kinder" by Wolfgang Leonhard. In addition to reading, I very much enjoy music, particularly jazz, with my favourite artists being Miles Davis, Keith Jarrett, Alfa Mist, Brad Mehldau, and John Coltrane.

Feel free to explore my repositories and projects. I'm always open to collaboration and discussion!