Robert Chai Email & Phone Number

Singapore

Utilizing my diverse background in Business Integration, Technical Know-how & Design Concepts, I consistently help consult on Product Strategy & Technology Trends, thereafter bringing together pragmatic Technical Advice & Solutions to numerous SME clientele. Occasionally, some of such advice turned into additional new requirements to help scope, design & build performance-optimized responsive-ready client websites primarily built on WordPress, Ghost, PHP, HTML, CSS, CPanel & CloudFlare.A software developer by training since 2003, my constant curiosity in emerging new technologies & trends, led to frequent assessment of their benefits and drawbacks through experimental build, and whether they may create better value for my next client project. These experimental SSG / SSR webapps, in my most recent builds, have utilized primarily (Frontend) JavaScript, TypeScript, ReactJS, NextJS, Redux, Tailwind CSS, MaterialUI, (Backend) Django, Python, PostgreSQL, Dokku, Vercel, CloudFlare, amongst many other libraries, as well as integrated external APIs such as Auth0, AWS S3, Stripe & SendGrid.

Building my first full-time business from scratch, I self-funded the company pre-graduation in mid-2012, serving a few clients who believed in the service quality and photoshoot experiences that I delivered at ROBERRYARTS STUDIOS (Photoshoots). Specialized in tailoring & covering Corporate Photoshoots, VVIP Events & Products that align with clients’ brand strategies, my array of work soon extended across other verticals including Lifestyle, Weddings as well as Family photography, to cover the needs of my clients. Subsequently, the brand branched out to two other portfolios namely CAPTUREFUSE PHOTOGRAPHY (Corporate Events), and MATCHMADESTORIES (Weddings), to cater to different clientele and audiences.From requirements gathering to strategic planning to orchestrating the final execution, every project seeks out a unique brand strategy that encompasses a set of underlying photo stories and design collaterals, where I will be able to step in and lend my expertise and help my clients to move their creative concepts into functional actions, as well as push their theoretical ideas into visual reality.Working across a wide spread of clients across the years, I am thankful for the opportunities to serve and provide tailored services ranging from personalized weddings to group photoshoots, and to being responsible for some notable corporate accounts like Airbnb (USA), LinkedIn (SG), Bloomberg L.P.(SG), Make-A-Wish Foundation (SG), ORACLE (USA), Shell (SG), WeChat (CN) and WWF (SG).The business successfully broke even roughly 2.5 years after being officially incorporated in October 2012. Moving forward post-2020, all brand subsidiaries have been re-merged under a single parent entity of ROBERRYARTS STUDIOS and will continue to serve clients on a small-batch boutique-service basis.

Singapore, Singapore, Sg

Zuellig is a 100-year (2022) pharma-distribution MNC championing key dispensation of major vaccines & medicines products throughout the Asia-Pacific (APAC) market. Originally covering demand from B2B markets, Zuellig had in recent years sought to digitally transform its businesses & expand into the B2B2C & D2C healthcare spaces, which led to the Digital & Data (D&D) team.Brought in to collate multiple siloed microapps under the umbrella of APAC’s first healthcare superapp, eZHealth (B2C), a new shared templating system was needed to ease this migration mayhem of: (a) Streamlining resources, (b) Unifying duplicated codes & (c) Consolidating common build services together. This birthed the “Boilerplate” webapp ecosystem.Architectured this superapp boilerplate using NextJS, ReactJS, Redux-Toolkit (RTK), RTK Query, JavaScript, TailwindCSS, MaterialUI, Mantine, StorybookJS with GraphQL, this webapp codebase saw a >40% efficiency bump over the existing builds, as well as significantly improved code maintainability through reusable cross-webapp components, centralized theming system & cleaner coding structuring. Additional toolings with Preetier, Jest, React Testing Library & Cypress were also added. Launched on Azure DevOps (ADO) with Docker within 4 months, it benefitted 3x new builds within the first 3 months. A monorepo build was also branched next, using Lerna & PNPM to experiment with improvements to code maintenance & developer experience.I subsequently led 2 teams of 6 frontend developers each to build out webapps for eZHealth (B2C) & DigitalPatientCare (B2B2C), as well as co-built webapp modules for other projects such as eZPharmacy-SG (B2C), eZRx (B2B-Marketplace) & eZTracker (B2B-Tracking), which impacted a combined growing userbase of 80k.Out of my key duties, I also mentored developers, improved internal technical hiring processes & was involved in the hiring of 5 new in-house developers.

UserTip is a no-code onboarding automation startup that seeks to enable Southeast Asian (SEA) B2B enterprises to simplify & upscale their digital transformation journeys.Hired as a versatile Fullstack Developer (Employee #1) who is capable of handling both frontend & backend integrations, my role gradually pivoted towards serving primarily as a Frontend (ReactJS) Developer. Tasked to re-architecture, simplify & rebuild a pre-MVP, no-code enterprise progressive webapp (PWA) from the ground up, I tapped on modern open source technologies like ReactJS, Redux, JavaScript, HTML5 & CSS3 for this build, which resulted in runtime performance gains of up to 20%. The pre-existing codebase was reduced by 55% with streamlined reusable components & the use of MaterialUI’s design system & component library. While re-integrating with a new set of RESTful APIs & JSON outputs from the updated server calls, I was also involved in troubleshooting runtime issues stemming from ReactJS’s Virtual DOM, as well as dependency complications relating to the integration of 3rd-party open-source NPM libraries.With some previous knowledge & expertise in User Experience (UX) / User Interaction (UI) / Brand Design fundamentals, I also helped improve overall existing & new user journeys by 75%, as well as untangle pre-existing process-flow complexities.Overall, alongside the significant improvements to future code maintainability by 95%, as a result of introducing TailwindCSS as a CSS framework, as well as building in Git versioning & CI/CD tooling capabilities, I also gained some entry-level experience working with JSON Web Tokens (JWT), MongoDB & AWS Lamba (Serverless).After completing the webapp build ahead of schedule, I was re-assigned to the Chrome Extensions team to help migrate the setup from Manifest V2 to V3, update the UX/UI, improve Webpack for production, as well as introduce Hot-Reloading & Custom UI-Library Components that cut preview-times & codebase by >40%.

Singapore, Singapore, Sg

Xfers is a payments gateway startup seeking to expand its offerings into the B2B market space with a strong focus on growth within Southeast Asia (SEA).Despite my short tenure of 2-months, I had successfully signed on 9x B2B Merchants (SMEs), with 9x more enqueued in the pipeline for final Compliance review. New key partnership conversations were also initiated with regional brand OCBC Bank and international eCommerce giant BigCommerce.Being the first-hire targeting the Singapore & Regional B2B payments market, I was instrumental in the setup & documentation of new end-to-end foundational sales processes & protocols from scratch, which eventually helped ease existing product knowledge transfers between coworkers and new hires by 80%, and inevitably enabled business scalability in the near future.To aid in accelerating existing manual processes, I had also taken upon myself to design and develop Google Sheets Trackers that automated 95% of our existing, manual Sales CRM operations, which are often human-error-prone and time-consuming. The trackers also subsequently benefited other cross-department/cross-platform teams within Sales, KYC, and Compliance, as similar data points and now streamlined and synced within a single Central-Source-of-Truth database.

San Francisco, California, Us

Uber (Pre-IPO) is a fast-paced working environment that sought a standard of efficient deliveries of good work across all teams.Being the first-hire on the APAC City Launcher (Maps) team, I was fast-tracked and trained overseas in Edinburgh, UK on the operating essentials by the Uber (USA) team, and bootstrapped a new technical operations team in Indonesia within a week after arrival.Subsequently, I developed some tracking, analytics & forecasting Google Sheets tools that streamlined all of our remote warehousing, manpower and logistics management, as my team needs to travel between cities and run our multi-city operations in parallel. The city of Jakarta was a highlight segment of my tenure. Considered one of the toughest collections globally, with roughly 34,000km of road coverage coupled with Jakarta’s infamous traffic jams. Paired with the tracker tools I’ve built, my Indonesia team of 7 also co-created new experimental techniques and trials, which eventually helped shaved roughly 2-months off our projected schedule—A 28% savings ahead of our planned estimates! In the wake of our accomplishments that were recognized by our regional superiors, the combinations of tracker tools and methodologies used were advocated, shared, and well-received by other regional and global collection teams for their respective projects thereafter. Throughout my journey, I had also spearheaded a few side initiatives, to help promote knowledge-sharing and skills-training for my subordinates, as well as reward schemes for our driver-partners for them to benefit more from their hard work.

I consulted for both corporate and individual brand-owners on Brand Identity and Visual Design aspects. As brand perception serves as a key staple in today’s highly-competitive visual-focused market, getting the visual cues perfectly aligned, especially in a digital-first market, is key to one’s brand success.Providing an end-to-end branding-design service, my work accompanied clients right from the start of our idea inception, all the way to the brand’s finalization and deliverables, by means of print, digital and web collaterals such as brand identities, print collaterals and interactive media, that will best fit the intended implementation outcome.In the last 6-years, I have produced numerous design ideas ranging from event-based shirt prints to large-banner prints, as well as product-related user-interface designs to mini micro-websites, for both small startups and corporatized clients like Singapore KK Women's and Children's Hospital & GEN Holdings Pte. Ltd.

I was privately engaged by an Angel Investor, to help envision go-to-market (GTM) strategies, as well as design, develop, and trial two stealth mobile applications (Chat & Health), while managing agile-focused lean remote teams across Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Within a 8-month span, we were successful at launching the chat app with a peak of 15,000 active users for both the Philippines and Singapore markets, while the health app failed to launch due to low market interest. Both projects were eventually shelved as the company pivoted towards blockchain technologies in late-2016.

Engaged originally as Technology Consultant, I was formally brought on board as a Product Manager, to help inject new startup-centric practices, as well as restructure EFFRO’s existing technical roadmap and workflow processes, given a previous lack of a CTO since the startup’s inception.Pitched as a Talent-Services Marketplace for events for Southeast Asian (SEA) markets, there was an unknown lack of organic traction and product utilization from the very start. After completing new rounds of interviews and UATs with a few targeted audience circles to better assess the perception of the product experience, offerings and brand awareness, the results prompted the team to acknowledge the differences in consumer interests and behaviors, in relation to the existing product build. After a decisive pivot, the webapp realized an 8% increment in new signups and new usage patterns.Managing two remote development teams across Singapore and Indonesia, we tapped on AngularJS, JavaScript, HTML, CSS & MySQL as our core tech-stack.

I had initially joined KEVINOU INC. as an assistant photographer, to learn the ropes of studio and fashion photography. Eventually, given the increased scale and budget of incoming commercial projects, I was then entrusted with the role of Producer, to help manage the intricate local and overseas VIP & celebrity photoshoot arrangements and executions of these projects. The previous international brands I was involved with included Procter & Gamble (P&G), the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), and a few international celebrity artists.

Singapore, Singapore, Sg

I served as a weekly Teaching Assistant to Professor Jason Woodard, for a class of 43 individuals. My primary scope of work involved managing in-class engagements, as well as providing trends & knowledge feedback to pitches and discussions by students. Coming along as a senior who had successfully completed the same course, I also aided as a consultant for students during after-class hours, to share my personal experiences and verify any queries and doubts, in an effort to help them better cope with the course.

Our project involved the development of an Entrepreneurs-Developers services-booking platform. Assigned as the Frontend Web Developer & Design Lead, our team picked up the newly-developed AngularJS framework to bring in webapp capabilities and improve UX/UI experiences for the web user. On top of AngularJS, we had also utilized JavaScript, jQuery, HTML and CSS for the frontend-stack, as well as Python and MySQL as our backend-stack. Given the manpower constrain, I also served as the Assistant Project Manager during my tenure, and helped track and maintain our team’s agile-focused workflows and production progress.

Slough, Berkshire, Gb

With an existing strong focus on Microsoft Windows-based C++.NET/C#.NET code development for the S2T development team, I was tasked to explore the potential viability of introducing iOS (Objective-C) development as a new language library for the team. The initially planned code research and tasked development of a minimal-viable-product (MVP), had to be revised and scoped down, due to the lack of in-house expertise coupled with an unexpectedly strong absence of developer-education content for iOS (Objective-C) development online. Eventually, with continued persistency, I was able to deliver a bare app prototype that accompanied with a code-introductory tutorial for the company’s internal team review on the viability to pivot a sub-division into iOS development.

Building on the belief that everyone have the ability to build up their desired “Financial Home” and lay a strong groundwork to achieve their Financial Freedoms, I help to educate, plan and execute new structured ideas with clients. In addition, I also help to update clients on the changing government, insurance, financial and healthcare policies and schemes, so that they may better benefit with current knowledge and make better, informed decisions for their financial and life-planning futures.

Singapore, Sg

Assigned to a technology-centric unit, I served as a technology trainer and consultant for the SAF Tri-Service (Land, Sea, Air). Besides setting up & teaching in-house courses on using Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Dreamweaver and Web Development, I was also an eContent authoring software (Lectora) instructor for military trainees, senior officers & civilian staff, to aid subject-matter-experts in digitizing their knowledge into digital training courseware content for all military services.In addition, I was also readily involved in the very initial internal wiki-content infrastructural setup for SAFTI Military Institute.

I was part of the initial team of four interns hired to brainstorm and bootstrap a new e-commence platform. Given that we primarily working on the initial stages of the System Development Life Cycle (SDLC) for this potentially large-scaled project, we were tasked to focus mainly on the backend schema design and development of the MySQL database, as well as to prototype some foundational frontend modules using C#.NET, HTML and CSS.I was subsequently invited to establish a new IT business venture with my employer.

Bachelor Of Science In Information Systems Management With Merit, Information Systems Management, 2Nd Major In Strategic Management

Diploma In Infocomm Technology (Ict) With Merit, Major In Software Engineering

Methods Of Instructions (Moi) Certification, Education