I push forward new ways of delivering projects to our clients, by streamlining the way we work. I see myself creating Tinkerbox as a backbone for entrepreneurs to kick start their projects and execute well. What makes me different is that I am a craftsman at heart.With over a decade of serving clients across many verticals, I have had the opportunity to work on many types of projects, including but not limited to:* E-commerce marketplaces (similar to Lazada, AirBnb, etc)* Multi-tenant e-commerce platforms (similar to Shopify)* Travel-related platforms* Citizen-facing government platforms (an incentive program)* Gamification platforms* Freight management platform* Fleet/resource management solutions* Feedback management solutionsTogether with my two co-founders, we grew the team to over 20 pax, with a strong emphasis on building a strong engineering and design culture within the team. I introduced and implemented practices such as Test Driven Development (TDD), Continuous Integration (CI) and Continuous Delivery (CD) to reduce any friction when shipping updates to our client projects.

As the CTO for UpCode Academy, I saw to the refactoring effort for a Ruby on Rails codebase as my primary task. The refactoring paved the way to support business complexity in taking payments on the platform while catering for government subsidies, tax liabilities, and will bring the platform in line with audit-friendly practices.In mid-April 2019, we launched the v2 frontend, which brought to the platform UI/UX improvements to aid with customer conversion, and improvements to our search engine rankings. In addition to my responsibilities as CTO, I doubled up as the Head of Web Engineering at UpCode, where I oversaw the direction for web development courses, as a new pillar for the academy, and as the instructor of the Ruby on Rails part-time course.

I was brought on to oversee the revamp of the Point-of-Sale line (POS) product line at EPOS, together with a product team 15 strong. This included building an extensible cloud backend to base all future product offerings on, and to move the business towards a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model. Starting from scratch gave us the opportunity to tackle important issues like performance (for e.g. scanning barcodes) and offline sync (in the event of connectivity problems) using the latest technologies and paradigms at our disposal. We experimented with technologies such as GraphQL but settled for more conventional JSON APIs for integration with the cloud backend, and built frontends that used gRPC for lightweight communication between in-store components.To deal with the many facets of building retail solutions (for e.g. product catalog, inventory, sales, accounting, operations, etc), I followed Domain Driven Design (DDD) principles in designing the overall architecture. In addition, I also applied concepts and principles from Event-Sourcing and Command Query Responsibility Segregation (CQRS) to deal with the transactional nature of retail operations, and to aid with the decentralization concerns that come with supporting offline operations.

As part of the first cohort of Entrepreneur First in Singapore, I explored several startup ideas and directions together with my cofounder. We were brought out of our comfort zones, as we had to validate our hypotheses with real (potential) customers via cold emails, but we learned a lot in the process.

I was mentor to a project team in the first batch of the TechLadies bootcamp. TechLadies is different from other bootcamps because it is less about classroom style learning and doing exercises, and more about throwing you in the deep end, where participants will have to learn programming on-the-fly to build a project for a non-profit organization.For the project team that I took on, we were tasked to build a case management system for Humanitarian Organization for Migration Economics (HOME), which can be thought off as a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, with some domain-specific features.Update: I am most glad to report that all the 3 participants that I've worked with on this project are still working in tech related companies, as of 2019.

I design and conduct the Ruby on Rails course, where we train entrepreneurs to build web products using basic rails. I've designed the course to be easily picked up non-techies, while at the same time leveraging on software development fundamentals should participants have them.

I give two talks to FI undergrads: Product Management, and Outsourcing. In my talks I provide practical advice that is geared towards early stage startups. I bring together modern thinking from the Lean Startup, Agile Development and Lean UX, and share my experience at Tinkerbox with regards to effective product management and outsourcing.