Being a software engineer in GovTech’s Data Science Division
You have probably heard of Singapore’s Smart Nation initiative. It’s a grand vision of how technology will be used to improve the way Singaporeans live, work, play, and interact.
But what does it mean for a software engineer like me?
I joined the Government Technology Agency (GovTech) in May 2015 as a software engineer in the Data Science Division, a multi-disciplinary team comprising engineers, data scientists and designers working on data science solutions across government. Being passionate about technology and software development, I was interested in seeing how I could develop and apply my knowledge and skills to help fellow citizens.
Before this, I worked for a year at ST Electronics on software-based signalling systems. While studying for my Computer Engineering degree at the National University of Singapore, I also spent a year working in a startup in the Silicon Valley, as part of the university’s Overseas Colleges programme.
My main role at the Data Science team is to work on the Data.gov.sg portal. Like all software engineers in our team, I work on various aspects of the platform. One week, I might be working on bug fixes for the main site. The next week, I might be working on integrating new real-time APIs from other agencies. Or, I might be doing tweaks to our cloud infrastructure — hosted entirely on Amazon Web Services — to make it more cost-effective or scale better.
The Public Sector Difference
If you have worked in a startup, you tend to have an acute awareness of how the company is doing financially and how your current work might make more money (or prevent the company from going under).
But in GovTech, your priority is not to make money but to improve the lives of citizens. That is always the starting point for any new idea or feature that the team wants to implement. For me, that’s an important distinction.
What I like about the GovTech culture
In GovTech, we believe in practical solutions, and empowering engineers with the flexibility and independence to solve problems.
Like a tech startup, we build many of our services on cloud infrastructure. Data.gov.sg is built using a number of AWS services. As an engineer, working on cloud infrastructure is perfect for learning by doing because you get to experiment with new technologies quickly while incurring next to nothing in billing.
And there is no need for a long trail on approvals and meetings before doing something as simple as starting up a new server to demo your new prototype. If you feel that deploying a service on Heroku is cost effective and would improve the team’s workflow, you can go ahead and build it.
You are also given the freedom to prioritise features and projects based on your inclinations and learning opportunities it might present. If your project timeline allows for it, you could take a break from your main role and help out with other projects. For example, a few months ago, I took a few weeks off to prototype a few essential APIs for a new transport platform the Data Science team is working on.
Another thing I like about GovTech is the open-office culture at the Hive office. You get a lot of exposure to other cool projects that are going on. If a project really interests you, you can easily talk to the experts working on it. Just a month or so ago, my data scientist colleagues helped a cross-agency team to figure out the signalling problem on the Circle Line MRT. It is very inspiring to get the inside story on projects like these.
Being in a multi-disciplinary team, you get feedback from different points of views. For example, while working on a new visualisation feature for the Data.gov.sg portal, I could get immediate feedback from a data scientist on the feature’s usefulness. After that, I asked a designer in my team if the new feature is visually appealing. This dramatically increases my productivity as I can get my ideas validated quickly.
Contributing to the Smart Nation, one project at a time
At the Data Science Division, I am proud of having built services that make open data easily accessible to the public while also improving the developer workflows needed to build cloud-based services for the public.
If you are interested in projects that aim to solve problems that are uniquely Singaporean and building solutions that will have an direct impact on citizens’ lives, Hive could be the place for you. The Smart Nation vision is ultimately made up of many projects — some big, some smaller — that all make our lives better.
Still keen? Click here to find out more. :)
