Hey everyone! - Part 2

Time to continue my self-introduction...

I enrolled into NUS School of Computing (Computer Engineering) in 2003. Friends told me to stay on campus in a student residence as its great fun, but I didn’t since I stayed really close to campus. Looking back, I should have moved into hall anyway at least for the first semester – definitely would have made campus life more interesting. I actually did apply for it in the later years, but apparently I didn’t have enough CCA points. I was a bit of a pool fanatic so my only CCA was cue sports. Guess my walking distance address from the campus did not help either.

Along the way I did some free-lance web development (PHP, HTML/CSS, Javascript) with a number of local start-ups. In 2005, I interned for Zuji, an online travel agency. It was a great team to work with and we did some interesting load testing and performance tuning for the website. I also did some security patches for their in-house framework. We mainly worked with Oracle 10g, J2EE, Struts and some Unix scripting. Subsequently, I introduced a couple of friends to work there as well. One of them is now working for GIC while the other is with RedNano.

In 2006 I took a leave of absence from NUS to go for an attachment program with Oracle. This was just before SoC’s ATAP program was launched. Again, this was a great experience for me as I got to work in Oracle Singapore, attend courses at Oracle University for free, and perform a five month stint in Oracle’s R&D centre in Beijing. Living and working in China was both eye-opening and a lot of fun. Especially when a bottle of beer costs just S$0.30... The stint also eradicated my previous misconceptions about China in general.

Returning to NUS after that was a bit tough, particularly because I now had one less semester. I ended up with 26 MCs of modules including CS3215 and honours year project for one semester. The following and final semester was slightly better with 21 MCs. I was the teaching assistant for CS2261 (Enterprise Systems Development) and research assistant in the Software Engineering Labs. Somehow it didn’t turn out to be that bad and I survived, with the help of my friends of course. Also managed to squeeze a bit of time to help out the fantastic guys at LinuxNUS with Project Cube (a PC recycling project).