My Summer of Bitcoin

3rd September 2022

I finally did it. I contributed to open-source. I started writing code professionally about nine years ago but have always found a way to avoid it. When encountering an issue with a library, the pain of switching to another always…

If You're Reading This

28th November 2021

Hi there! Wow. It has been a whole year since I’ve written on this blog. A lot has happened since. Here are some highlights: Spent the whole of Q1 2021 in Singapore with family Came back to the US in Q2 to enjoy what remains of our…

Digital Health Needs Better Identity Systems

15th October 2021

When Apple announced the Apple Watch in 2014, I was very excited about its possibilities.  I wrote in one of the earliest posts on this blog: Looking at HealthKit that has metrics like blood pressure and sugar levels got me so excited…

✍️ Why I Made A Speed Dial App

20th November 2020

Today, I’m announcing the release of SpeedBoard, a speed dial app made for everyone. SpeedBoard makes it easy for you to configure calling/texting shortcuts for your iPhone and put them on your home screen with iOS 14. Configuring…

🔨 How My Grandparents Inspired Me To Build SpeedBoard

20th November 2020

When we gave my grandparents their first smartphones, they had a lot of trouble using it. Feature phones were simple. They came with hardware-based buttons and represented 90% of what my grandparents used their phone for: calling. This…

✍️ I Grew Up Here

30th September 2020

Here is the story of how I fell in love with computers. I did not know software engineering existed as a profession until I was thirteen. Up till then, all I wanted to be was a ‘computer expert’. I thought all ‘computer work’ was…

🎤 Tacit Editing Livestream

15th September 2020

This month, Cedric is helping me level up my writing dojo. Every Thursday, we get on a call, and I watch as he edits my drafts, sentence after sentence. We do this so I can acquire the skills ”tacitly,” getting into his perspective and…

✍️ Pandemic Standard Time

10th September 2020

I have been thinking about time. When the pandemic started, I was ecstatic to be free of “mindless” obligations. I even kept score. Between the time spent on my commutes and having to get ready, I would save at least two hours each day…

✍️ Make QA Your First Engineering Role

30th August 2020

My first serious tech job was at UserTesting. In 2016, when I started a year-long internship there, I was asked to pick a team to join. I was spoilt for choice — I could have joined literally any technical team I wanted. What were my…

🤔 Brief Notes on Singapore's Plans To Launch a Wearable Contact-Tracing Device

8th June 2020

One of my favorite artworks I studied this semester in my Art History class was “Newton” by William Blake. Blake’s style was often known as the godfather of comic book literature, and the main villain of his art was Isaac Newton. He…

✍️ What French Dining Taught Me About Authenticity

13th May 2020

I will never forget my first time at a French dining table. I was served some bread with butter to spread on top of it. Hungry and excited, I was immediately confronted with this sight: Yikes. If no one were looking, I would have been…

📚 Book Review: How The European Renaissance Shifted Humanity’s Relationship with Art

4th May 2020

For my English class in college, we were asked to summarise a chapter from John Berger’s book Way’s of Seeing. The book broadly struck me as a poignant critique of our relationship with images throughout history. Using examples from…

📝 Meditation: Changing Economic and Ideological Environments

19th April 2020

The following was initially published in my weekly newsletter, Apperceptive Mess. The world is on a value exchange holiday. In our “socially distanced” environment, we are now bearing witness to evidence that markets are social…

📝 Defining Quality

8th February 2020

Foreword: Inspired by Devon Zuegel, who writes a wonderful blog, I will be incorporating the idea of explicitly declaring “epistemological status” at the top of all my posts on this blog going forward. Epistemic status: high by virtue…

📝 To Build a Sustainable Culture of Innovation, Stop Trying To Be Efficient

20th November 2019

In the 1990s, Dell Computer hit its stride and quickly rose to become the one of the most successful and profitable computer companies in the world. However, in an attempt to continually improve efficiency metrics and financial ratios…

📝 Why Did You Choose To Move from Singapore to the US for College?

13th November 2019

In his book The Real Enemy, Pierre D’Harcourt recounts a story of an eminent scientist during his time in Buchenwald. Fearful of being stricken by a cold at 5AM when roll call is taken, the scientist knew fully well that if he slept…

🌏 Quadratic Voting: How Mechanism Design Can Radicalise Democracy

29th June 2019

“Quadratic Voting offers a better way to make collective decisions that avoids the tyranny of the majority by allowing people to express how strongly they feel about an issue rather than just whether they are in favor of it or opposed…

⌨️ Understanding Elixir’s GenServer APIs

23rd June 2019

Introduction In this post, we dive right into learning how processes in Elixir work, what is GenServer, and the patterns that govern each GenServer application. The content below assumes you have reasonable knowledge around basic…

☕ Conversations with Visakan Veerasamy

16th June 2019

Yesterday, I met with Visakan to discuss a whole variety of topics. It all started with a question I sent on Twitter to him: what holds Singapore back and where does a country who generally gets praised for nearly everything go from…

📝 Building A Society of Free, Prosperous and Responsible Individuals

2nd June 2019

Stubborn Attachments makes the case that all policy decisions, unless constrained by inviolable human rights, should be made in the primary focus of sustainable growth. The book cites the metaphor of the “Crusonia Plant” — an idea…

🗒 Adapting to Abundance with Apple News+ and Apple Arcade

31st March 2019

We have a limited amount of hours each day. We spend 6-8 of them asleep, another 7-8 working, and what remains is “leisure time”. We choose to spend that time in a variety of ways. We can spend it with our families, trying out that new…

🗒 Some Thoughts on Evangelicals and Missionaries

17th March 2019

Before you get your pitchforks out, I will like to make explicit in advance that my view on religion leans towards agnosticism. When it comes to understand spiritual faiths, I am more invested in learning more about them as narrative…

🗒 Notes from “Tech as a Taste-Based Industry”

3rd March 2019

Living here in Singapore, being so close to rising regional technology hubs like Vietnam, Indonesia, India, and Thailand, we do not have shortage of access to skilled, low-cost, software engineering talent. I have always struggled to…

💻 Keeping Track of What To Read in 2019

6th February 2019

After reading this magnificent post by Simon, I was inspired to come up with a new way of processing information when I read my books. You can read more about that here. In this post however, I will take everyone through a step-by-step…

📝 Time, Suffering, and Love

4th February 2019

I recently read Carlo Rovelli’s The Order of Time, a book that takes a truly remarkable approach in explaining a complicated subject in a way I hope more books on physics can be. The book is broken down to 3 distinct sections: first…

🗒 Innovation and Market Efficiency

2nd February 2019

It will not be unheard of to associate “innovation” with “efficiency”. Central in a lot of our minds lies this question: can more funding/programs/nation-wide support help create an ecosystem of innovative companies? Singapore has been…

🧠 Re-designing my Information Processor

13th January 2019

In 2019, I am making a personal commitment to improve my reading on the following fronts: Information retention Becoming more self-authored Make more connections with material I engage with Deep in the bowels of my Instapaper archives…

📝 Highlights and Notes: The Design of Everyday Things

5th January 2019

I loved this book because the themes that surround the topics discussed inside here do not limit us to product design. “Designing things” is a process and a discipline that demands an individual to not only think of problems…

💻 Fixing a slow initialisation of ZSH

10th November 2018

If you use like I do, you will have probably ran into some painfully slow zsh startup times (10-ish seconds). And this is not an uncommon symptom: After digging through the interwebs for a bit, I could determine and conclude that the…

📝 Highlights & Notes: Antifragile by Nassim Nicholas Taleb

28th August 2018

1. Someone who has made plenty of errors — though never the same error more than once — is more reliable than someone who has never made any A common theme throughout this entire book promotes practice over theory. In a world ridden…

Farewell, Specialist Cadet School

23rd August 2018

Today I officially graduate from Specialist Cadet School as a sergeant! It has been a memorable 6 months and here are some pictures I wanted to share. For graduating from cadet school as one of it’s top cadets, I get some shiny things…

Anyone Else But Me: Utilitarian Autonomous Vehicles

3rd November 2017

A couple of months ago while I was still in school, I had to write a paper discussing an ethical conflict. As someone who works in technology and is constantly exposed to the ever-growing conversation of artificial intelligence, the…

Definite Optimism as Human Capital

4th September 2017

This was a fantastic 20-minute read on getting it’s readers to re-think the importance of manufacturing and industry, optimism as fuel for innovation driven by movies, and perhaps how a recession has more detrimental effects on the…

A Fortnightly Summary: Issue #1

28th May 2017

Hello and welcome to issue #1 of my little blog series. This format is heavily inspired by Dave Pell’s mailing list, which you should absolutely go check out because it’s how I get my news with a good laugh these days: http://nextdraft…

DOM and Component Elements in React

1st February 2017

In the past couple of days, I’ve been taking some time to fully understand and wrap my head around the react-fiber-architecture document. In it’s prerequisites section lies this gem, where Dan Abramov goes into detail the core…

Podcasts I'm Listening To: November 2015 Edition

5th November 2015

I consider myself a heavy consumer of podcasts - I listen to them while working, commuting on the train, eating breakfast, getting ready for school. Recently I noticed I have this massive build-up of podcast backlog, and the…

Goodbye buUuk Part 2

18th October 2015

I really don’t have much to say about it, except leaving now really feels like leaving the first house you grew up in. My learning and growth as a young adult has accelerated so much at buUuk the experience is quite surreal. Albeit…

Disrupting Routines

10th October 2015

Tomorrow I’d be going mountain-biking with Paul (a really awesome colleague of mine) at Bukit Timah Nature Reserve. It’s my first time doing mountain biking of any form so I think it’ll be interesting. It’s been a long time since I’ve…

I Need to Slow Down

4th October 2015

Yes. We’ve all reached this point when trying to learn to many things at once. It gets so bad that you wind up not actually getting anything done. For me, I’ve been trying to do too many things: Write a Chrome extension for Nebulo…

Do You Have A Life

4th September 2015

“Do You Have A Life?” Just last week, the holidays have begun. To many people, this is a great time, because they’d get a break from the stress of school; to finally enjoy their lives without concrete societal responsibilities. On the…

ResearchKit and Apple Watch

10th March 2015

Copyright: Apple Inc.Copyright: Apple Inc. ###“oh god not again” Millions of Apple Watch articles come out today, but I just wanted to quickly pen down my thoughts: especially from what I’ve seen with ResearchKit. I promise I’m not…

February Fourteen

15th February 2015

Thought I’d say this first: no I will not be writing about how happy I am to be single and mope about my romantic life like it’s supposed to be a post on Thought Catalog. It might seem like I’m heading that direction, but I’m not…

Taking Ownership

28th January 2015

Sometimes we all like to think we are all at the mercy of circumstance; from our family backgrounds to our current state of mind. I really disliked Secondary School, not because my teachers or my friends sucked or anything, but it was…

Long Lived Apps

19th November 2014

My friend and I were having coffee the other day and discussed about newer apps being more transient than the early birds. They tend to fade after 2 years in your devices and quite frankly, they’re not bad apps at all. The discussion…

Wrong Being Wrong

5th October 2014

Josh Davis put up a fantastic post awhile back based on the video from Google I/O 2009 titled “The Myth of a Genius Programmer”: I certainly don’t think that everyone has to “put themselves out there”. But I do think that if you do…

Windows Nein

2nd October 2014

There’s something Marco Arment said in his blog post a while back that went something like this: It’s not that Microsoft is incapable of making radical changes. Not only was Windows 8 the most bold move they’ve made since Windows 9…

Letters From 9914

11th September 2014

The following are notes I’ve taken on Day One, regarding the Apple wearable. I’m a huge Apple fan and this upcoming Apple wearable has gotten me really excited. I wanted it to be more than just a glorified pager - something that’ll…

Future of Learning Programming

1st September 2014

As the barriers to entry lower and become more accessible on the internet and in schools, more and more people will soon be able to learn how to program. What will soon discern a good from a bad programmer is the ability to solve…