Ten Years in Tech

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

• Got a Samsung Galaxy Ace 2
• Got into Android ROMs, installing ROMs like Cyanogenmod and MIUI
• Started lurking in XDA forums
• Decided to (try) learn Android development from a YouTube series by xda-developers (I couldn’t find the series anymore 😔)
• Did not really understand Android development and gave up (Failure #1)
• Printed out tutorials on Java and trying to learn Java (yes, I printed them out and bound it)
• Did not enjoy learning Java too much and gave up again (Failure #2)
• Wanted to find the “perfect language” to start programming
• Visited the public library many times to borrow books on programming like C# and web development
• Tried setting up the family computer (Toshiba Satellite) to dual boot Ubuntu and Windows
• Accidentally wiped the Windows partition instead 🤡 (Failure #3)
• Discovered a video about why programming is important

• 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

• Took a leap of faith and decided to pursue my interest in tech by studying IT at Singapore Polytechnic

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

• Focused on technical writing instead
• Got really into Elixir through 2020 Advent of Code
• Started writing about Elixir on my blog
• Invited to write for company blogs
• Got articles featured on Elixir newsletters
• Studied calculus in my free time to prepare for university
• Applied to US universities like MIT and Stanford for Computer Science
• Got rejected by every US university (Failure #7)
• Built chris, a Pratt parser written in Go
• chris was featured on the Golang Weekly newsletter

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! 🎉