My name is Mary Xu, and I'm a developer with a passion for sharing experiences
through my work. I graduated from Georgia Institute of Technology with a Bachelor's in Computer Science and a Master's in Computer Graphics, and I am currently a Software Engineer at Meta Reality Labs.
My dream is to work with creators in computer graphics, bringing to life new and immersive worlds.
Skills I bring to the table
Technical
Creative
What keeps me busy
Industry experience
Meta Reality Labs
Unreleased project | Software engineer
Lead engineer on a 3 month project with several engineers. Helped scope multiple workstreams. Currently driving individual workstream through QA testing and experiment release.
Designed and developed React systems to restrict a unique type of user from accessing certain features across the Oculus app. Built on top of the contactless accounts systems listed below.
Scoped requirements for certain feature restrictions with product and design teams.
Contactless accounts in Oculus | Software engineer
Lead engineer on a 5 month project with several engineers. Drove workstream through QA testing and experiment release.
Designed and developed multiple robust React systems to restrict certain users from using sensitive features across our Oculus app and across multiple tech stacks.
Scoped requirements for feature restrictions across the whole Oculus app. Worked with the product and design teams to finalize these requirements.
Avatars | Software engineer
Lead engineer POC for designing and developing a robust system for continuous color choices for Avatar 3D model creation across all platforms.
This work created a foundation for implementing continuous color selection across hair, skintone, eyes, makeup, and accessories.
Meta Quest Store | Software engineer
Developed new features to the Meta Quest Store that aligns with Meta's VR and mobile app store experiences.
Personally worked on new item tile metadata, badges, and add-on and bundle flyouts for the product detail pages.
VR Right Account Experience | Software engineer
Designed and developed a system to reconcile birthdays for Meta Accounts to make sure that the account has the correct birthday and is aligned with the correct VR experience, especially if the account is owned by a minor.
Georgia Institute of Technology
Computer Graphics research
Simulated human grip on PyBullet. Grip is difficult on PyBullet due to the lack of friction on solid bodies.
Created 3 different bethods of increasing contact points and pliability of a gripper to simulate grip better.
Computer Graphics Teaching Assistant
Hosted office hours to answer student questions about projects, debug their code, and give pointers on how to start or comlete projects.
This included giving a lot of background on various computer graphics concepts.
Graded student projects based on a rubric. Gave feedback about what went wrong and went went well in their work.
Microsoft Office Online Infrastructure
Software engineer intern | 2020
Created an internal tool that automates the transfer of datacenter configuration data from configuration files to a source of truth in a database.
Saved future developers 50% of the work for this transfer process. Created a more reliable and central location for all of Office Online datacenter configurations.
Software engineer intern | 2021
Migrated our services to use Azure Managed Identities for authentication instead of connection strings and certificats.
Reduced cost of managing our secrets for our services by 91% and eased future Managed Identity setup.
Microsoft SharePoint
Explore intern | 2019
Our three person intern team built an interactive and customizable dashboard where different blocks of information can be moved around, giving the user more power to see what is important to them first.
This created a stepping stone for other teams in Microsoft 365 to implement similar dashboards.
I worked on making sure the state of the dashboard stays the same after changes whether the changes are from moving the blocks around or from adding and deleting blocks from a side panel.
Chick-fil-a Innovation Center
Software innovation intern
Evaluated accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity of models learning food safety hazards. My script outputs all the incorrect predictions as well as accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity over time.
GoProcure
Software and design intern
Automated sales data updating process. Wrote a macro script in Outlook Visual Basic and a script that will parse the data and save it into a MySQL database.
Designed and improved the marketing website to bring in more clients.
Game creation
Ghost with the Flow
Game designer + artist
In an endless-runner, play as a restless ghost hunted by the void dashing for a little more time in the afterlife. With a sea of ghosts in your path, merge and jump from ghost to ghost to lend you enough speed to outrun the void. Fail to dodge obstacles in your path and the void will catch up.
This game was made during MelonJam 2024. I was the sole artist and made all the assets and animations for this game.
This game won #9 overall and #4 in graphics.
Waterboy Adventures
Game developer + designer
The main character's village is experiencing a severe drought! Help him gain abilities and replenish the water in his village.
Waterboy Adventures is a puzzle-based game. For this collaborative effort, I developed AI pursuit agents, weapon logic, character persistence logic, and treasure chest persistence logic.
I also modeled all four different character bodies in Blender.
Lumberjack Jack
Game developer + designer
Jack has lost his way at work one day! Help him get home by obtaining 4 keys to escape.
Lumberjack Jack is an escape room GBA game. This was a solo project where I programmed, designed, and drew everything.
This project won Top 10 projects in the Computer Organization and Programming class of 400+ students.
Escape to Elysium
Designer + artist
The ground is gone. Monsters have destroyed Grealia. A mystical portal is humanity's last hope to escape from these monsters' wrath.
Explore islands, collect resources, upgrade your ship, and battle mosnters to survive and be the one to Escape to Elysium.
This was a board game created by Golden Swarm Games, a board game studio I started in 2018.
This game took all 4 years of undergrad and two iterations to balance and make playable in a decent amount of time.
Besides leading the studio, I was the leader of design team for this game, easing gameplay for potential players and working on assets like the game board, card + tile + player card UI.
Hackathon hacks
EarthCents
PennApps
System that uses computer vision and a pre-created learning model to recognize bottles and cans. This will be used for to exchange a bottle for a coin to incentivize recycling.
I worked on the front-end as well as communication between the front-end and back-end. I also designed and made the cardboard structure for the Arduino board and servos.
Depression Hotline
SwampHacks
A webapp to guide the friends and family of those who suffer from depression. This webapp analyzes text for the stages of depression and based on that will return a suggestion as to what the user should do.
I worked on the front-end of the webapp and research into advice to give the user.
