I'm Bryan Hu, founder of Billion and Quillium. Programmer, photographer, and pianist.

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Bryan Hu

What I'm building

My current projects

Stuff I'm currently focused on building

Billion

Most people find out what their government did after it has already changed their life.

Browsable summaries of bills, executive orders, and court rulings. It started as my Congressional App Challenge entry and outgrew the competition.

  • Dual-Lens view

    Progressive and conservative readings of the same bill, side by side.

  • Your ballot

    Track what you're actually voting on, and who is actually on it.

  • Sourced, always

    Every summary cites primary documents.

Billion's Browse tab, listing recent bills with plain-language titles
A Billion bill summary with its spectrum view and source link

Quillium

Version control for prose.

Draft a sentence three ways and decide later. Every version stays inside the document instead of being overwritten. I built it because I kept losing the better draft.

  • Branching drafts

    Alternative versions live in the document until you pick one.

  • Local-only

    One SQLite file on your disk. Crash-safe, and offline by default.

  • Anchored notes

    Comments attach to the exact words they're about, not the margin.

A Tale of Two Cities — draft
Quillium showing a passage with an active revision branch and an anchored comment

Open source

For a GNU dawn!

Python libraries, developer tooling, and a long tail of pull requests into other people's projects. All of it public, most of it still maintained.

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stars on my own work
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contributions this year
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repositories
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upstream projects fixed

Featured

A closer look at 3 of them.

The story so far

How I got here.

Roots

I learned to build by shipping to strangers.

Python libraries on PyPI, with real users and real bug reports: async UDP in aioudp, HTML-to-Markdown in unmarkd, project tooling in pyt2 and idae. Publishing them taught me everything around the code — docs, CI, semver, and how to tell someone their feature request is out of scope.

Teams

Then I learned what a deadline with other people feels like.

FRC Team 3256: elevator subsystems, 3D simulation, anti-tip logic, and the scouting app. Two seasons, seven awards, and a lasting respect for code that has to work on the first try in front of a crowd.

Leadership

Someone had to run it, so I did.

I was CEO of VC Assist, a student-run non-profit maintaining my school's digital infrastructure, and I founded the VCSD software development club — where I wrote the curriculum and built the teaching tools, because nobody else was going to.

Proof

Competitions were the reality check.

3rd place in the 2025 Congressional App Challenge for CA-19, top 2% of picoCTF 2026 at 174th out of 8,747, and USACO Silver. The App Challenge entry mattered most, because it turned into the thing I do now.

Now

That entry became a company.

It grew into Billion, heading to iOS and Android. Quillium came out of a different frustration entirely. I'm all in on both, which is a nicer way of saying I have stopped starting new projects.

The receipts.

10 awards

Off the clock

I also point cameras at things.

Freelance photographer, production crew, and a musician with more certificates than gigs.

Canon C200 cinema camera

Behind the camera, and behind the switcher.

Camera operator
Canon C200 · School assemblies and productions
Vision switcher
Live multi-cam · Assemblies and church services
Post
Final Cut Pro · Logic Pro · Darktable · Editing, grading, and music production
Hire me to shoot something

In the bag

  • Canon EOS R7 Body
  • Canon EOS 40D Body
  • EF 70–200mm f/4L IS USM Telephoto
  • Tamron 35mm f/1.4 SP Di USD Prime
  • EF 50mm f/1.8 II Nifty fifty
  • EF-S 28–105mm STM Kit

Music

Because without music, life would B♭

Piano

9 yrs

Solo pianist

  • Certificate of Merit Level 10, State Honors
  • 3rd Place — USOMC Intermediate Baroque, 2023

Trombone

8 yrs

Concert band and jazz band

  • 2nd Place — Folsom Jazz Festival, 2025

Let's build something.

Hiring, collaborating, or just want to argue about editor architecture