When we were still children, our school teachers taught us many things. When we become adults, who teaches us at work? Every year, I coach junior software engineers on clean code and object-oriented design in the GoTo Engineering Bootcamp. I believe learning new tools and technologies is easy, but learning to write high-quality code distilled from previous software engineers’ wisdom is hard.

For the past decade, I have worked on software in the financial technology domain. Most of the time, I bring revenue to the company. One of the ways was leading two engineers to cut bank transfer costs by $11,000 per month through switching from the old bank’s interbank to the new bank’s intrabank integration. Sometimes, I cause losses because of bugs. One of the bugs was a wrong decimal conversion. I always pass my learnings to the junior software engineers joining the company every year.

I realized two things recently. First, building cities needs planning, and to plan, we need to analyze data. I like to play city-building games. I have never realized that building real cities needs engineering until now. I am learning how I can contribute to improving the Geographic Information System software with my software engineering skills. Second, building cities involves moving people and goods using vehicles, and to manage those vehicles, we need to capture data. I never realized that managing vehicles needed telematics software until now. I am learning how I can process telematics events and produce insightful dashboards.

After a decade in financial technology, I am now excited to grow into the domains of how software plans and operates cities. If you are interested in building systems to make better cities, please feel free to connect with me.

My Mission

Building better cities by building better software.

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