2025 marks my tenth year in tech. 15 year old me would not have imagined that 25 year old me would be having so much fun with a random hobby he picked up but here I am, pursuing tech as a career!

To mark ten years in tech, I thought it would be fun to document my journey in tech so far. I also wanted to point out the amount of “failures” I received throughout my ten year journey, to serve as a reminder that everyone starts somewhere and getting started it always the hardest step.

Secondary School: 2014 - 2016

  • Ignited a deeper interest in me to learn more about it and treat it as a fun hobby and find a wider community to enjoy it with
  • Dad brought me to Bras Basah to browse second-hand bookstores
  • Got books about C++ and iOS development
  • Installed Visual Studio to learn C++
  • Did not have an Apple machine to learn iOS development (yes, the book became useless) (Failure #4)
  • Started picking up C++ and understanding the fundamentals of programming
  • But really struggled with understanding pointers (who doesn’t on their first attempt) (Failure #5)
  • Took the O-Levels and did really well (L1R4 of 4 and L1R5 of 6)
  • Faced with making a tricky decision of choosing Junior College or Polytechnic
  • Unsure if I should study chemical engineering or information technology

Polytechnic: 2017 - 2020

  • Started my diploma in Information Technology!
  • Started learning Java as my first language in school from Derek Banas
  • Built my very first proper project for school (a chat bot!)
  • Joined The Programmers Hangout
  • Met an amazing community of people who were equally passionate about tech
  • Became a moderator on the server and continued making friends from around the world
  • Started side projects to explore different technologies like Kotlin like a Discord moderation bot, Spotify API wrapper, and extensible Markdown to PDF conversion library
  • Introduced to MightyAim by a friend
  • Working at MightyAim for a while as an Android developer, building an SDK to allow existing applications to adopt a gesture-based workflow
  • Received my first paycheck (of SGD 300!)
  • Went back to Bras Basah to buy books on algorithms and operating systems with my newfound wealth 🤑
  • Attended PHP Conference Asia 2018 even though I didn’t know PHP (and still don’t)
  • Invited to teach a workshop for students over the semester break
  • Put together “Introduction to Android Development with Kotlin” and taught over 15 students live!
  • Discovered my love for teaching and writing through this experience
  • Started my blog
  • Got placed to DBS Bank for my polytechnic internship under the SOI Re-platform team
  • Worked across teams to get 90% UAT completion (across over 90 teams) and did a bunch of root cause analysis
  • Attached to XCLR8 for my Final Year Project
  • Migrated the backend from Java to Kotlin Spring Boot and the database from MongoDB to PostgreSQL
  • Became valedictorian of my cohort! Graduating with a 4.0 out of 4.0 GPA
  • Still felt like I wanted to find my tribe in person
  • Was rejected from the PSC Scholarship (Failure #6)
  • Got accepted into NUS Computer Science
  • Started a research internship with DSO National Laboratories
  • Integrated social media information for unsupervised stance detection and was exposed to NLP research!
  • Enlisted in the Singapore military

National Service: 2020 - 2022

University: 2022 - Now

  • Enrolled in the National University of Singapore’s School of Computing, studying Computer Science
  • Joined Residential College 4
  • Met many close friends in RC4
  • Joined NUS Google Developer Student Club as a backend software engineer on Project Sight Word
  • Met more amazing friends from GDSC
  • Realized I was not cut out to be an academic weapon after struggling in my first semester (Failure #8)
  • Realized that getting a job in tech was very hard after flunking a bunch of technical interviews (Failure #9)
  • Discovered the existence of Leetcode
  • Joined NUS Hackers and finally discovered my tribe IRL
  • Articles were noticed by Ethan
  • Ethan offered for me to do an internship at Betafi using Elixir + Phoenix!
  • Joined Betafi as a software engineer intern and worked on improving the video processing pipeline and adding project templates
  • Started the Technical Interview Study Guide to compile my notes from interview preparations
  • Taught a workshop on Git and another on databases for Orbital
  • Became the top student for CS2103/T (Software Engineering)
  • Returned to CS2103/T as a teaching assistant (and got 4.8/5.0 for teaching feedback!)
  • Taught a web development with Elixir workshop for Hackerschool
  • Taught another workshop on Git for Hackerschool
  • Got internship offers from Google, Citadel, Palantir, and PayPal!
  • Organized Hack&Roll 2024, supporting the web app used by over 800 live participants and 40 organizers
  • Realized on-call isn’t fun and that the web app had to be rewritten to be more intuitive (Failure #10)
  • Taught yet another workshop on Git for Orbital (again)
  • Joined Citadel as a site reliability engineer intern over the summer on the Central SRE team
  • Met an amazing team and mentor, Nelson
  • Worked on preparing the Commodities Observability Platform for a disaster recovery exercise and implementing an automated incident post-mortem tool
  • Flew off to London immediately after to join Palantir as a software engineer intern on the Developer Console team
  • Met awesome people both within the Dev Console team (shoutout to Zeyad, Amish, Nadira, Xinyi, and Tim!) and outside of the team, creating amazing memories in London
  • Integrated Platform API support into Ontology SDK clients and made many memes
  • Working intensely towards getting the rewritten web app out (and I did!)
  • Returning to school!

Wow! That took a while to recap! It has been such a wonderful journey and I am so happy that 15 year old me decided to get into tech. I got to meet so many amazing people and work on so many interesting problems.

Although I have had many successes as well, I have faced many failures as well (10 in total!) and these failures have taught me so much. The past ten years has been so fun and I can’t wait to see what the next 10 years has in store for me! 🎉