Yang Pei

I grew up in Mannheim, Germany for my first ten years before moving to Beijing, where I attended the Western Academy of Beijing (WAB) and Beijing BISS International School. Starting school with only basic classroom English was a bit of a shock, but with some help from a Dutch classmate who spoke German and friends from the school bus, I quickly found my footing. That period in Beijing was also where my obsession with hardware took off—building PCs around AMD Athlon CPUs (and occasionally burning through them), flashing firmware, and playing games.

At eighteen, I moved to the UK on my own to study Computer Science at the University of Reading. Those early months in a cold house share with two other students were solitary, but the years of hands-on hardware tinkering paid off eventually. When I interviewed for a junior web dev role at NVIDIA's European office in Theale, being able to rattle off pretty much any GPU spec got my foot in the door.

Today, I work as a Technical Development Manager at LGC Group supporting NIHR, building production AI platforms and agentic workflows, while running a local compute lab with an NVIDIA DGX Spark (128GB unified VRAM) and an RTX 4090 to experiment with unconstrained open-weight models.

Outside of software, I've spent years shooting with Leica rangefinders—both film and an M10 digital body, usually paired with a 35mm Summicron ASPH or 50mm Summilux ASPH. To me, photography isn't about chasing megapixel count; it's about capturing the essence of a subject with honest glass and natural light.

I built Compusential as a personal corner on the web for things I find interesting: AI and computing architectures, photo essays, and practical tech explorations.