Dioni Zhong

Storyteller trapped in a programmer's body.
Worked on movies and video games in my past lives. Yes, you know the movies. Maybe not the games.
Two Bachelor degrees — Software Engineering and English Literature & Creative Writing.
One funded my entire life. One did not. Guess which is which.
Lived in 7 different countries, 9 cities. Perpetual chronic identity crisis is part of the identity.
Stumbled upon a home in a small city in the southwest corner of China in 2023.
I semi-retired from full-time jobs when I was 40 (year 2022).
Now I am semi-unretired and working on multiple passion projects that primarily focus on telling stories and connecting people.

[2026.06.18] Been working on a Kunming walking tour at kunmingwalk.com the past few months.
If any of you coming to this corner of China — come find us! ;)

I've been enjoying working on the website too. I have always had a passion for web dev. Granted the way I work has changed massively since I first started tinkering with web, which went all the way back to Uni some 25 years ago. In general tech changes a lot and changes fast anyway, but web tech in particular always feels even more fluid and is continuously evolving.

But I find that it almost doesn't matter how I do the web dev. If I had to write character per character by hand I would, and did. From raw HTML, CSS, PHP, from static to dynamic websites, to all the different blogs, CMS, from server side script to client side, from backend to frontend, from python to JS to react, docker, containers, and the many many web frameworks. And now if I have to use Claude code, I would, and do. Apparently if you love something you just love it and will continue doing it. :)

[2026.03.12] I "retired" from coding for the past few years. Recently checking what's this whole AI thing about, only to realise that coding is a bit like riding a bike. The body remembers. And boy has it become a lot more fun since I left! Feel like a superhero who discovered a whole new superpower when coming out of her retirement. Like Rambo. Or Wonder Woman. Like running up the mountain with a pair of Chinese robot legs.

Find me on

White Rabbit

Fun fact: meexia (short for meecharixia) is a name of a character I created when I was 20yo. I believe my drawing of her gave me a scholarship to do a game development program in Canada, and paved the way for the rest of my career in games and VFX for movies.