Yesterday my wife and I launched our first business together. It’s so new at this point that our revenue is still, well, zero. But in the lead up to our official launch yesterday, which culminated in a simple launch party with a select group of friends and trusted industry professionals, we had…

https://vimeo.com/300023705 Today, my wife and I launched Singapore’s first bridal veil boutique. It has been a beautiful day of many firsts, the coolest among which is that this will be the first time we’re formally working together as a married couple. We are, as you might imagine, quite excited…

Tomorrow is going to be a big day for my wife and I as we launch our first business together as co-founders. Just one and a half months ago, I said something that she said something else to that eventually created some sparks. The inspiration to combine our skills and interests to start an online…

A very cool tool that I discovered today from google searching is JSON Diff. It does exactly what you expect it to. Paste two JSON files into the tool and it shows you the differences between them. My use case At Smartly.io where I work, we sometimes have to help our customers debug a problem with…

When people are confused, I have seen some choose to not ask a clarifying question. Most of the time, that aversion comes out of fear of being embarrassed for asking. You don’t know even that? I’m not like that. To me, if I’m confused, I have enough confidence in myself to know that the person who…

I’ve often asked this question to myself and I’ve never really gotten a satisfactory answer. “I don’t know, I’m kinda both,” would be my truthful answer. Are you a planner or executor? A visionary or an implementor? Strategist or tactician? Not knowing which label I fall under sometimes makes me…

Each of us workout for a different reason. For me, it’s become less about vanity and more about actual physical strength. Sometimes, especially in recent times as I’ve grown slightly stronger, I workout to de-stress. Depending on your reason for working out in general or on a particular day, how…

You’re the one I’ve been looking for. After years of trying to beat Evernote into the shape I want, I have failed. And look, now I’m falling for you. Bear app vs Evernote Here are a few problems that Evernote has that you, Bear, don’t: It takes ages to launch. You’ve launched in under a second so…

Recently I was back in the military for training. This time it was in Australia and a handful of us conscripted soldiers coincidentally had a personal book in tow. Just in case there’s ever a “rush to wait, wait to rush” situation. There was. One of the more popular books among the crowd, which I…

We do so much just to keep up, why not reduce our needs so we free ourselves from having to do so much? It’s definitely possible to strip down our “needs” to the bare essentials. Every in-camp training (in the Singapore military) that has an outfield component confirms that. So why not do it? Why am…

And so it begins, another thrusting into the unique social hierarchy of the military. It makes me uncomfortable to don the uniform every year. Why not? I’m a citizen ninety five percent of my adulthood. It’s hard to, at the snap of the fingers, get into the role of a soldier. The social hierarchy in…

As I read, my wife sat beside me on our blue couch tapping at her phone. A quick glance confirms that she’s typing the text for another Instagram post. This isn’t a post about how we should spend less time on our phones. Heck, I’m typing this on my phone right now! No. This is about how different…

Setting up Liquid for server-side rendering for an app and for some reason, a simple arithmetic operation is incorrectly yielding the value zero? I recently met with the same problem with Shopify Liquid divided_by giving zero. The solution is trivial, but the problem could take you (like it did for…

YouTube recommended me this video from Gymshark today and I found myself immediately connecting with what it stood for. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZmSXVPApUfg They produce videos of people working out hard to upbeat, motivational music. There is nothing complicated in this when we see the end…

When I got my new job recently at Smartly.io, I was given a choice of a MacBook Pro with a 13-inch or 15-inch screen. I chose the bigger screen and now, I have to say, 13 inch is the sweet spot. I chose the 15-inch over the 13 mainly because I’d never owned a laptop with such a big screen. I…

Google released a product called Google Blog Compass (link broken as Google decommissioned the service; removed) that is supposed to help bloggers know what to write. Sounds like a great idea, right? Now you’ll know what to write that people will want to read. But I think there’s something off…

Not my colleagues, but this scene is totally normal in Smartly.io I just wanted to tell the world how cool I think that is. Why would people rejoin after quitting, all things considered? Here are some immediate problems with rejoining a company from a not-particularly-imaginative mind: Your…

Here’s my version of the three second rule applied to purchases: if something puts a stupid little grin on your face for three seconds or more, and it’s something money can buy, spend and buy it. Because if something manages to make you smile genuinely for three good seconds, it’s a blue moon object…

Our company recently introduced a hiring referral program as a pilot. This development sprung out of needs from a company entering its growth stage and it’s interesting because, before this, the assumption was that we all had the best interest of the company at heart - no rewards required to keep…

I’m frustrated, which is usually a good state to be in to write. Nothing flows like anger out of the body. This time though, something is different. Not sure what it is, but I don’t feel like airing my grievances about my neighbour. Perhaps I’m feeling like enough is enough. Yes, I think that is it…