Q1 What’s Your Story?

I usually like to begin with my career experience. Why? Because it’s everywhere (almost). Graduated with Bachelor of Science in Biotech form Monash University, I’ve not engaged in any work related to Biotech honestly.

The first job I had was in Commercial Banking dealing with business loans. Here we like to call them the loan shark with license. Haha. Jokes aside, I’ve really learned a lot from this job because it allowed me to look at how business owners think, work and make decisions, and how businesses manage their cash flow because I had to know all these to convince the bank to loan them the millions that they need to expand or grow their business! This is also when I started to pick up my drinking + socialising skills because it is crucial to connect at a deeper level with our clients to squeeze them dry for cross selling understand their needs well.

Three years into banking, I stumbled upon an opportunity to start my own business! What business was it you ask? It’s a brand of fibre tech cleaning products from Austria that cleans without using any kind of detergent, just water. Being an early adopter, I was totally passionate about it Being young and hot headed, I dived into this business without doing much market research and validation. Not knowing much about business strategy, management and marketing stuff.. I honestly was reading, learning and applying as we go. With that kind of energy I had, I did a satisfactory first year and managed to break even within 9 months! clapping for self. Then… things started to go south and the business was eventually terminated nearly 2 years after we began

I was broke… but no beaten. In 2014, I worked for family business in construction where I learned a lot about project management (and… got certified for it :D) and started to work on my second start-up idea: online marketplace for Healthy, Organic, Natural, Eco, Sustainable & eThical (HONEST) products which was covered by Vulcan Post – HERE!

2 years of design, planning and development, Luveco Marketplace was finally launched in May 2017 and~ terminated in October 2017. Phew… almost suffocated there. Oh I was still seeing a lot of opportunity there but still decided to move because:

1. I realised that I did not study competition well – or rather understand the landscape of online marketplace and organic products.
2. Did not do sufficient preparation and was… again literally learning and applying digital marketing, advertising and branding as we go.
3. Was really losing out on speed due to lack of knowledge, skills and resources.

Once again… I was broke and this situation activated my back up plan - learn coding and pursue a career as programmer. Yeap, I’d attended a three months super intensive full stack web development bootcamp and here I am! Ready, passionate and burning with fire to embark on this new journey!

Q2 What kind of full stack developer are you now?

I’m trained on Ruby on Rails… wait, let’s not get too technical here because you can find them all in the rest of my resume. Here, I’d like to highlight that I will always try to strike a balance between being technical and making business sense (experience from my past career).

If I’m working for you.. I’d always look at what creates value for the business, how can we optimize things, how can we grow! I’m not a job guy – I look for a challenging career filled with opportunities to learn, achieve and shine.

If you hire me for a freelance project – rest assured that I will also provide advice on how the technical part of the web/apps is suitable or not suitable for your business and generally point you to directions on how to growth hack your business!

Q3 What really motivated you to pursue the career path you have taken?

I’ve got to be honest. It’s money and family. ….Have you ever felt so helpless and useless when someone you love is sick and dying and there is nothing more you can offer.. except company. Well, I have – when my dad was sick and passed away when I was 18 years old. Till today, I still feel guilty for not being able to send my dad for a better treatment and see a better doctor.

No, I don’t think money is everything.. but you will definitely suffer without them. What I want to do now is to always be financially ready to support my family for emergency needs… and giving them the best where I can.

Q4 How do you work?

1. I’m not a workaholic, but I like to be productive with all the time I have.
2. I enjoy working in team – it’s the beauty of creativity and work quality coming of many wonderful minds towards achieving a common gaol. It’s just satisfying.
3. I like to see things improve – I enjoy optimizing how things work especially when it comes to businesses. The satisfaction from such achievement feeds my soul.
4. I’m a top down guy – plan big and go details.
5. I’m goal oriented – that’s because I lose focus and direction easily if I do not plan thingsahead, i.e. life goal, work goal. Anything.

Q5 How good is your programming skill?

I’ve just graduated from Next Academy. It only took me 3 months to get from totally zero knowledge in programming to what you can see in this site and my portfolio. What is stopping me from jumping to the advance level? Well, I think the most important thing here is not just how good I can code.. but rather how I have learned to learn.. and learning them fast!

Q6. What do you do in your free time?

Four main things:

1. Spend time with family. I’m the kind of guy who can just watch my son sleeping for a long time. It feels as good as when I’m productive while working.
2. Read books, includes but not limited to topics such as management, investment, selling, trading, marketing, branding, EI, NLP, business strategy, Sun Tzu Bing Fa, Chinese Medicine, Confucius, start-up stories etc.
3. Comics and Novels. Because it fills my mind with stories and letting me experience a different kind of life that can never be possible. Ok. I just really love stories.
4. Game, it doesn’t matter if it’s PC or Console I play them all. But I only play games that are worthy of my time (else I rather prefer to be productive at learning and doing things that earns me money), i.e. Final Fantasy, Fallout, Zelda, Metroid, Gears of War…

Q7. What would you like to do before you die?

Seriously, I’d love to be a part of the community that brings about change to the world. Nope, not the zombie apocalyptic kind of change. I hope to be able to pilot projects that allows humanity to live sustainably with the nature. Things like green city, smart home, renewable energy, IOT are just too darn interesting!

No… It’s not about being noble or being pro-environment... I just love to see the world staying beautiful the way it should be and for the sake of our children.