Augustin Chan

I'm the CTO and founder of Digital Rain Technologies. My work asks one question: how do we build AI systems that expand human capability without quietly eroding human agency?

I approach it three ways — enterprise AI architecture, published research on how symbolic frameworks alter model behavior, and surgical software: small, high-leverage tools built to solve exactly one problem well. Read how this introduction came together.

I also produce and co-host the Hong Kong AI Podcast, a conversation series with practitioners building Hong Kong's AI future.

Previously, I was a Development Architect at Informatica, leading enterprise architecture for Fortune 500 customers — a global role with an APAC focus, with a lot of remote support for US customers. Before that, I was a Senior Consultant at Dun & Bradstreet.

I hold a B.S. in Cognitive Science with Specialization in Computation from UC San Diego.

Latest
The Bridge Nobody Should Need Just Became the Only Way In
Eight months after I over-engineered a GitHub Actions publishing pipeline for a friend's WordPress site, the site went down hard — and that pipeline held the only deploy key within reach. A post-mortem on WPIDE, PHP 8.2, --skip-plugins, and the day the automation math finally worked out.Jul 2026

Essays

Short posts

Full archive

Research

Building

Enterprise migration & readiness

  • Crawlopen-source
    Migration intelligence — automated discovery, risk scoring, and planning for legacy system modernization.
  • Graftopen-source
    AI-native BI report translation — parses Tableau, JasperReports, and FineReport into a vendor-neutral IR, then analyzes and translates report logic across platforms.
  • ARA Evalopen-source
    Framework for decomposing autonomous AI risk into 7 dimensions, so practitioners can evaluate whether agents can act without human approval.

Symbolic systems & classical computing

  • 8-Bit Oracle
    The I-Ching through the lens of retro computing and science fiction — tech-noir art and commentaries. Presented at Taipei Blockchain Week.
  • Six Lines
    iOS app for learning the I-Ching as literature and philosophy — bilingual hexagram reference with classical commentary and public domain masterwork art.
  • Plum Blossom Computer (GitHub)
    Cosmological computation terminal — I-Ching divination (梅花易數) fused with on-chain commitments and real-time astronomical data. Built at the EasyA x Consensus HK 2026 hackathon.
  • seeded-iching-engine (GitHub)

Research platforms

Podcast

  • Hong Kong AI Podcast15 episodes
    I produce and co-host real conversations with AI practitioners building in Hong Kong — covering research, fintech, robotics, spatial computing, healthcare, culture, and the local AI scene.

Speaking

Consulting

People App, Travelbox