Back in the infancy days of Carousell, Shopback, Lazada, and Shopee (circa 2012 to 2015), and several others that went before them, like my previous startup Hoiio, the Singapore tech scene as compared to where it is today has seen some tremendous shift. In the most recent NUS survey, for…

For twenty years now, the Spider Man quote, “with great power comes great responsibility” has been used so much that it deserves no further veneration. Software engineers for the past ten years found themselves in a rather unusual spot. Not only are they paid a ton, the cost of failure…

Recent conversations around Android Runtime Optimizations has to do with a technique known as Profile-Guided Optimization. (or Profile-Directed Feedback) The idea behind it is that the software engineer can consider various code paths a user would typically go through and pre-compile these paths instead of leaving it to the JIT…

Around the time when the world was moving out of the 2008–2009 recession, the tech industry also found itself at a rather unique crossroads. On the one hand, IT Ops have always been a staple, especially in large corporations. …

Today, there is no shortage of materials talking about the what, the how, and the why of software craftmanship. From the days of Extreme Programming, to understanding the Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture, to the SOLID and ACID principles, to modern day concepts such as Clean Code Architecture, Reactive Programming…

A mere observation of the product management zeitgeist today quickly reveals that there is no shortage of information about why A/B testing is important and how one can use them. …

So you’re a dinosaur 🦖 who first wrote code in Fotran and have finally smoked your way into the CTO title without being a cofounder.¹ You pretend to memorize Functional Programming operators like your cable TV channels and you think Hadoop is an attraction in Disneyland. Now, you’re airdropped into…

In the recently published Android 13 Developer Preview blog post, Dave Burke noted two new functions around hyphenation in TextViews: fullFast or normalFast. He noted that these new flags help in rendering hyphens without visible impact in text rendering performance. …

The world of software engineering is oddly dominated by hyper-specialized individuals wielding megaphones on Reddit, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Because the echo chamber is so loud, one is tempted to think a good engineer must be modeled after the sophisticated buzzwords they’re using and the seemingly smart advice they throw out…