Students of NUS BES in the lobby of Dao Diamond Hotel I was in Bohol, Philippines as part of an overseas field trip at NUS involving 54 students from the Bachelor of Environmental Studies (BES) program from 17 May to 1 June 2018. I was there in an official capacity as a teaching assistant (TA), but…

Touching down at Mactan-Cebu International Airport This has been an interesting year for me so far. I started the year having just left my previous job as a software engineer, received an offer to be a lead instructor teaching web development on the weekends and teaching assistant on the weekdays at…

We can sit and watch people do amazing things, get inspired, and then do nothing. Or we can also do some amazing things. Doing anything requires effort, let alone amazing things. So don’t ever think it will be easy! It’s as Mark Manson says, “What pain do I choose to sustain?” It’s safe to assume…

“Do more,” says Casey Neistat. “Be the hardest worker in the room,” says Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson. “Wake up before everybody else and work into the night. Hustle”, says Gary Vaynerchuk. This is the air we breathe on social media, day in, day out. It’s unsurprising that productivity has become the…

In an earlier post, I lamented the fact that some companies have an interview process that requires very specific preparation. My main gripe was how it took time away from my preparation for other interviews disproportionately. I’d like to now correct myself. I don’t think that way of thinking is a…

Photo by 胡 卓亨 on Unsplash When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Tao Te Ching This is a deeply important saying that I believe will either set a student for stellar success or utter failure in learning what he or she set out to learn. To me, this is trying to say that a student needs to…

For me, holding a book elicits a different feeling compared to holding a phone. The former feels productive, quiet, and tactile; the latter feels more potent, disruptive, and distant. “But they are different things!”, you say. Yes, true, and I’m reflecting on it. We judge a book by its focus, but…

One thing led to another, as usual. Elon Musk shared a video on Instagram and I followed his prompt to watch the full version of the video snippet he posted. It’s not about rockets and not about electric cars, so by process of elimination - you guessed it. It’s about artificial intelligence. Nothing…

Today’s thoughts were formed while riding in the Singaporean traffic jam Among the many interviews I’m doing at the moment, none has been more involved than the one I’m going for tomorrow. I’ll not reveal the company name for now since it’s not much of a value-add, but don’t read that as me saying…

One of my few struggles today was to reason with myself to buy (or not) this typewriter for $120 What’s daily life if not a series of subjective experiences? If the only life I know and can possibly understand is through me—that is, my own subjectivity—then it’s really the only thing that I can…

No matter how many posts covering how many topics in however much depth that I write and publish here, they will only ever add up to an infinitesimally tiny fraction of all there is to know in this world. But I find that encouraging, not discouraging. Nobody will ever know everything, and if we know…

We root for the underdog at first. Until the underdog becomes the new incumbent. Then we start scrutinising the incumbent in fear, worrying they would start doing things that are harmful to us individually and collectively as a society. Along the way to dominance, most would suspect the organisation…

Photo by Blake Connally on Unsplash I have something to admit. The first time we were introduced to Node.js at programming bootcamp, I only had a vague idea of what it did. Now that I’ve attended WDI at GA once as a student and twice as a teaching assistant, I understand Node.js slightly better. One…

Here’s a quick and dirty illustration that helps me visualise the difference between (available only in ES6) and . The value of (initialised as ) is now available globally while (initialised as ) is only available inside its own block and not outside. Note that this is happening because…

Photo by Beatriz Pérez Moya on Unsplash If you’re just starting to learn to program, it can take a while to wrap your head around data structures like arrays and objects. I’ll walk through my thought process on how to structure data with a simple quiz game. Along the way, I hope you’ll be able to…

In web development class today, many of our students faced a problem adding event listeners to an array of HTML elements (ok, DOM nodes to be specific). Imagine you have a grid of 9 buttons forming a tic tac toe board in your HTML page. You want to console log the button’s index number when it is…

Photo by Paul Gilmore. New to programming and heard about the usefulness of git and GitHub? In this article, I’ll give you the only quick and dirty summary that you need to have a clear conceptual understanding of what these things are and what they’re not. Git is not GitHub, and vice versa Let’s…

Using socket.io for your web socket needs? Me too. It’s a real enabler of a technology, ain’t it? But even tools good can sometimes have unclear APIs. With socket.io, I came across a subtle but very important difference: // sample code on Node.js server for a chatroom app io.on(‘connection’, (socket…

We just got back from a trip to San Francisco. Aside from strolling along the bay by the Golden Gate Bridge, we visited our friends living there. One thing was immediate apparent: most of them had either an Amazon Echo or Google Home in their homes. That’s awesome! These things just haven’t quite…

Somewhere in Oakland along Market Street. I’m currently in the San Francisco Bay Area for a short vacation. It’s been a fun trip so far and it’s also quite fruitful as I’m meeting friends who are based here who are mostly working in tech. As an outsider with my own cultural lens, I can see that…