Introduction

Ah! It's a great feeling to be blogging again! It's been ages since I last blogged about anything; most of the time only consuming blogs and never contributing.

My former blog was called Codestumps.com but this time I decided to get a domain using my very own name. It's going to be a place where I share my opinions and experience on things related to tech, cooking (that's one of my hardcore passions) and career success.

13 years in a blog

The early years

I started working at the really cool Lucasfilm company. This was where I began my journey as a web developer (back in those days, there was no concept of fullstack developer). Those were great times man. The web was simple back then. I was young, I built my first couple of web applications and I thought I was a rock star!

I moved to Hangzhou in Zhejiang Province, China to work in a start up called eBalu as an engineering manager, hired 3 super cool guys and built a production ready ERP application in 3 months! Definitely one of my proudest moments in my career. Two kidney stones later, the company ran out of money and I moved to Shanghai. In 2013, I found some work helping an acquaintance build a social-fashion-ecommerce site targeting the wealthy Chinese. I left shortly after 3 months after a disagreement with the Lead Software engineer (let's just leave it at this...). I'll talk about this in another article in the future.

After 2 months, I landed a job at a Chinese gaming start-up as a Software Architect (Storage). This was both an eye-opening and heart-wrenching experience. This was my first time working in an all Chinese firm. Some of the things that went on there was truly amazing, while other things made me frustrated as hell. They could clone a popular mobile game, built by some Korean gaming company for the Android market, and launch it on both Android and iOS in 5 days! I'm talking about art-work, animations, coding, and deployment. The frustrating part was that their codebase was very bad. You could tell just by how they created instances of class objects that they were ex-Java developers coding in Python. They didn't seem to care about memory leaks even after telling them about it. They just shrugged it off saying that memory is cheap in the cloud. They would hire 9 interns to run scp commands just to deploy to their 9 cloud servers. Yes...I kid you not. I knew I had to get out of there as soon as possible.

Luck and Fortune

I managed to join Morgan Stanley Shanghai in November 2013 after a gruelling 6 rounds of interviews. Each time, I felt like I failed the interviews. I joined the Technology and Information Risk department as an Associate Software Engineer. This was my first dabble in the world of cybersecurity and big data; two of the hottest buzz words in tech at that time. I had one of the best times ever at Morgan Stanley. The people were smart and I had really strong mentors there. I was mainly working with Perl and AngularJS. My boss Erwan Le Doeuff remains my good friend and trusted advisor on all things related to my career. I guess I was lucky to be surrounded with the brightest minds and rock stars. Some of my team members were:

In 2014 my wife gave me a son. By 2016, my wife and I made the difficult but logical decision to return to Singapore for our son's education. I joined JP Morgan Chase in Singapore. I was fortunate enough to be hired by my boss who left Morgan Stanley to join JP Morgan Chase in USA. It was during this time that I re-learnt Java to build backends using Spring Boot. I also picked up Angular 4/5/6 to build a user interface for our data lake. Over time I learnt to appreciate Java more and more.

Got promoted in 2019 and had my first taste of management. This was both fun and challenging. It was fun because there was a lot of cross functional collaboration involved with this role. Challenging because as a new manager, you tend to run into the situation where you still want to do everything yourself but realize there just isn't enough time to do everything. So now you give up control and learn to be surprised.

COVID19

During COVID-19 I decided to change jobs; missing the vibe of a start-up. I moved to a company called Speardome. They were trying to build a cybersecurity solution for critical industrial control systems. While I didn't spend a lot of time here, I learnt a very important lesson on management here: Management styles must adapt on a team by team basis. Different teams require different management styles.

I currently work at my wife's food manufacturing company called You Tiao Man. I leverage my software engineering skills to automate the daily repetitive operations and delivery scheduling tasks. I mashed together a delivery scheduling application using a combination of:

Twilio Messaging API
Google Sheets API
Shopify REST API

On top of this I self-taught myself digital marketing using Facebook and Google. I help the company craft intricate marketing funnels so that we are able to build laser focused advertising campaigns.

Closing words

It's been quite a journey thus far. However, these two months of looking for a new job, I have re-kindled my love of technology. I am picking up new tech skills that are sought after in the market like Docker and Kubernetes. Furthermore, I am re-discovering Python 3 and its plentiful packages in the recent years.

I've been practicing HackerRank/LeetCode type questions lately and have started to get a hang of it.

Wish me luck in my job hunt!