Earlier today we had a guest speaker come in to speak to us (the Web Development Immersive class) broadly about computer science, algorithms and data structures and things like that. He also shared his experience at General Assembly Singapore, which was a bit over 4 months prior. That got me…

You find yourself suddenly with the heavy responsibility of coming up with a marketing strategy for a tech company with a product you actually believe is going to be great for e-commerce businesses. What do you do? You panic a little, just enough to get your creative juices squirting all over the…

As crowded as the internet is in 2017, anything well thought out and clearly written will be read, as long as it is discoverable. Every writer should write with that confidence in mind, and let that confidence spur you to write even more. At some point, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy: the…

Painters in training spend most of their time understanding the theory of light, pigmentation, dilution and so on, and put these to practice through painting exercises that allow them to explore the theory and witness it play out on canvas. When a painter graduates from school, she begins to put her…

Programming bootcamps are everywhere now. Some are up to the mark while others make up for it with good marketing. Whichever the choice you end up making, it’d be a mistake to think that you’re going into one, say a web development bootcamp, to learn HTML, CSS and JavaScript. No, you’re not. You are…

Merry Christmas! It’s really just Christmas eve as I’m writing this. I’m at a coffee shop, the traditional Singaporean kind from the 1970s, and I’ve just had the most wonderfully spontaneous encounter with a 66 year old Malay gentleman.  We each sipped our rendition of  teh as we traded thoughts…

Sal’s 4 tips for writing blog posts as a developer It’s Christmas Eve and I find myself itching to read and learn more about programming, so naturally, I went to Medium.com. Three posts in from scrolling I came across a post from John Saddington, an “indie” developer who has built and released…

Humans have mental models of everything. How is that birthday party going to be like? How does it feel to be entering a new stage in life? What are some challenges I’ll likely face when I’m in it? Mental models are useful. They are stored deep in our memory and get called whenever we need an inkling…

One of the key principles of good programming is DRY - Don’t Repeat Yourself! Here’s one way to reduce repetition with event listeners by using an array iterator that I’ve used a number of times now. If you haven’t done this before, here you go! If you have an even cleaner and easy to understand…

I’m starting a new (short) chapter in my life as a teaching assistant at General Assembly Singapore. Actually, yesterday was my first day and it was great. Questions I used to ask myself are now aimed at me and my fellow instructors, and being able to answer most of them (well, it’s still early to…

This is 2016 - our phones receive and send data packets by the megabytes per second, simultaneously. Sometimes I imagine seeing lines of data shooting across in front of me, crisscrossing into multi coloured highways. So much data is moving so quickly it would indeed be a spectacular sight.  But…

Why get involved when you know it’s not necessary? Ask yourself, why do I need my blog to rank high on Google? If I asked myself that question and answered with full honesty, there will be silence. There’s no need for my articles to rank well. An article that is helpful will naturally rank better…

After doing the work—to follow up on a lead or apply for a job—it easily feels like we deserve an answer. That we have cast the net and now we should expect some fishes to swim right in… But the truth is, those fish may never come. Life has a rhythm and from what I know, regardless of what that…

Let’s say you’re given an array of numbers, and you’re required to find the smallest number in the array. How would you do it? Though I didn’t find this challenge difficult to complete, my solution looked like a Toyota Prius next to the Tesla I saw on Codewars today. Here’s what I would have done…

It’s 9:50pm on an otherwise wonderful Sunday night, and two officers from Certis Cisco, under the appointment of URA stood outside my door. They are here to bring us back to square one. We had a good thing going, my wife and I, renting out our spare bedroom to guests from all over the world. Airbnb…

Time is almost up! One last week and we’ll be official graduates from General Assembly’s web development course. But before that, one final project. One final push to build something—anything—for fun (and practice, of course). I shortlisted a few project ideas in preparation for this week and I’m…

Our class recently had the good luck of having a really good developer come speak to us about web development. Chardy Wang is the CTO of Stacck, a local company building products for F&B teams. His talk was held together tightly through one thread: how to develop web apps. It’s one of those talks…

Worms (the game) is the first thing that comes to my mind when I think about drones and air-drops. “Special delivery!” and some cargo drops from the sky and lands softly with the aid of a parachute. This being 2016, there is of course already a startup working on making that an actual thing. Flirtey…

This is the order we learned about web development: HTML —> CSS —> JavaScript —> jQuery —> Node.js/Express server —> Postgres SQL database —> Heroku deployment —> Ruby —> Test Driven Development —> Ruby on Rails server By the time we started on Rails, most of us already had a good grasp of…

The world’s first 3 plants under my care I used to fake a frown to look like I was thinking. You know, so I’d look just like an adult, always lost in deep thought, supposedly pondering over matters of importance. Nowadays I frown often and uncontrollably and I find it hard to snap out of it and…