Tag Archives: Tech

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I also explained to them that all work would be moving into a collaborative space. I set up accounts with Huddle,TeamworkPM, Basecamp and Asana. I would’ve preferred to only set up one tool but each of these platforms offers something unique that my respective clients needed.

via How I Gave up Email and Reclaimed 3 Hours a Day – 99U.

I wonder if I could the same? moving our partners over to project management systems.

Although Intraix communicates within ourselves using project management tools but towards our hardware partners, we are still using emails. And I been kinda of becoming an email slaves recently, especially with our launch of product overseas.

Emails flying back and forth with regards to all kind of details. Such as contract, technical issues and even small chats. Sometimes I woke up with 91 emails in my inbox. To some, this may seems normal but to me, this is way too much details to read in the morning.

reading emails in the evening

And I know but I still do it, is that I will read the emails, just in case I missed out any stuff. But this is also affecting my productivity especially my morning “alone” time. So I tried shifting my email time to the evening, currently this is working well for me. Email notification are turn off during the day and I’m able to better focus on the content of the email rather than just sweeping through because I cleared my ‘todos” in the morning.

30 days “check email twice a week” challenge

but still, it would be best if I could reduce the amount of emails. So I’m  applying a 30 days “check email twice a week” challenge to my work mail. It would be tough to totally cut-off from emails at first , coz we still need it for validations and all. I would start with checking my work inbox twice a week and introduced our collaborative tools to our partners.  And hopefully I can move to a “no email” challenge in the future.

So how are you managing your emails? listening here

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Having Flat Tires? PomChek Go Where Is Here To Help.

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pomchek locates your location and find the nearest three bikeshops
clicking on the selected bikeshop and it will give you more details
clicking on take me there, gives you the direction to the bikeshop

After days of waiting, my app have gone LIVE on app store. I think I can now officially call myself a ”developer”, maybe an amateur one.

so what is pomchek go where?

pomchek or rather “pancit” means flat tire in Malay. pomchek go where means when you meet with a flat tire situation, where should you go.

why did I build this app?

Besides setting a goal for myself, when I started learning iOS. I also wanted to build something that I use. I love cycling and there are times when I gotten a flat tire on the road and I need to find the nearest bike-shop available, otherwise it would be expensive cab fare for me.

Than you would be thinking, can you not google? Yes, I can certainly google but when I tried it does not return me all the bike-shops listing available in Singapore , plus even there is one bike-shop location return to me, it might not be the nearest. So I decided that I build a simple location app myself that helps me find nearest bike-shops in Singapore and hopefully someone would find this useful too.

how does it work?

it is a very basic location based app, it does not even required a login.

  1. You download the app and you turn it on, it will determine your location. And it will be returning you some of the bike-shops nearest to you. Currently I set it to return bike-shops within 10km, but I’m thinking in the next update I would reduce it to 3~5km.
  2. And if you selected a particular bike-shop from the tableview, it will give you details of the bike-shop. i.e. name, telephone and address
  3. The “take me there” triggers the apple map to give you the route to the nearest bike shop by walking.

That’s it.

why the cat photo?

I plan to actually show the respective bike-shop photo but it takes up too much time, so I decided to a cat photo. In the next update, this picture would be replace by a random instagram photo. I would be using their api to call for the hash-tag #bike, when a user click on a bike-shop, it would return a different photo, hopefully it would make it more interesting.

how do I make money?

The question that any people ask, I actually have a plan to make money for this app. But currently, the back-end is running on parse and I have less than One million api calls so it does not incurred any charges. If and only if it really (fingers cross) crosses “One million api calls” than I would put my plan in place (otherwise it’s free) I would love to hear ideas about making money from this app from fellow entrepreneurs

I need your feedback

finally, I would love you to download the app, not to give me 5 star rating, because I’m not the kind that goes around asking for 5 star rating but I need your feedback to improve. I know feedback are hash, but only having real and solid feedback than I can learn and become a better developer. So Dear friends, pls give me feedback. Thank you so much for your time.

Work Experience Or Going After A Degree?

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Our Education Minister Heng Swee Keat shared his view on chasing paper qualifications on a recent news article on Today.

A good academic qualification alone “does not guarantee a good career”, especially in the current volatile and fast-changing economy where mismatch of skills and expectations for job-seekers could occur, Mr Heng told some 300 graduates and their parents in a speech at Temasek Polytechnic’s graduation ceremony.

I personally thinks that the problem does not *entirely lies on the students but also on the hiring companies. I graduated from Temasek Poly with an engineering diploma, after National Service, I worked as a CNC field engineer before pursing a degree from NUS Business School. Continue reading →

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When you have a long stretch when you arent bothered, you can get in the zone. The zone is when you are most productive. Its when you dont have to mindshift between various tasks. Its when you arent interrupted to answer a question or look up something or send an email or answer an im. The alone zone is where real progress is made.

via Getting Real: Alone Time by 37signals.

I feel that I get more things done when I’m alone too.

When we first started Intraix, I keep thinking that as founders we have many things to do. Things like pitching, developing products..etc etc. But looking back, I realized I am wrong. In fact, I feel that I have more free time or rather ‘alone’ time where I could sit and down and Think.

The true ‘busyness” comes when you get your First customer, because we have to devote our 101% of our commitment to them. Now that our customer base have grown, it is ever harder to find that alone time. Heading to the office is just to reply emails, phone calls and addressing our customers issues.

I’m sure many founders find it hard to have time just to do their stuff. When I have a bit of time to sit down and start jotting down my notes, the email notification appears or the phone call rings. Sure, I can turn off notification, I tried it before but the reaction from my customer will be: “hey I called/emailed you a few times, where were you?…You know the…” And this broke my chain of thoughts. Plus I do not want to do this often because this would affect (IMHO) customer satisfaction.

What I’m doing now is to wake up early at 5:30am to start my alone time and I find it the most productive time spent for it. Product roadmap, cashflow management and milestones planning are done within this period of time. I still leave emails and phone calls to the “normal working hours”. I would love to stretch this alone time longer but getting up at 4:30 is really tough. So friends and founders, please share with me if you have altnatives or better ways of getting the productivity time.

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I’ve found that when faced with a set of seemingly insurmountable challenges, the first step towards making it easier is to break things down into as large a set of small individual tasks as possible.

via Justin Kan.

Indeed small wins are important.

Especially right now when I learning to code. At the initial stage, it seems almost impossible for me to understand the codes / methods taught in the appcoda. But as I break down the codes into smaller parts, the learning process is so much better and I feel much better too, because I’m able to proceed ahead instead of being stuck behind.

Taking this trick, most of what I do now are broken down into smaller parts, even my daily todo list.

Am I Good Enough For Medium?

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Last Wednesday, I woke up to a surprise email from Medium; this Medium I’m now writing on. It was an invitation to join the platform, to be part of the community. Trepidation soon filled the shoes of my initial excitement. Was I good enough to write on Medium?

Am I Good Enough For Medium? — This Happened to Me — Medium.

My first writing on @Medium, why I was worried that I may not be good enough to write on Medium.

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Had the opportunity to met up with the founder of Open Source Cafe (OSS), Mr. Tsutomu-San. OSS as people call it is a co-working space in Tokyo, where NOT only tech people hangs out but also artistes and musicians. ~ It’s a place to create

CoderDojo, an open source programming club for kids

via CoderDojo Tokyo – Open Source Programming Club for Kids.

He shared with me his interesting for design and code. He also runs a weekly class call CoderDojo, that teaches young kids to code. I could just feel it through his eyes that he is so passionate about teaching and he inspires me. (Just like Kong, who believes that everyone can code)

So I’m writing out this post to share with everyone about CoderDojo. There is no CoderDojo for Singapore yet, but the closest one we have is littlehackers.com. The site is not up but the facebook group has lots of interesting stuff.

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Building Your Own RSS Reader?

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Since the announcement of Google Reader closure, I been looking around and testing out for alternatives. I have narrowed down to two different services, which I kinda unable to make a choice.

Feedly has a great UI for both it’s browser plugin and mobiles apps. It allows me to steam through the content easily and the night theme is awesome. (you will love this if you love lying on your bed and be reading from  your ipad or iphone). But it adds another app onto my home page making it clutter and gives me another app to manage. Continue reading →

How Do Tech Blogs Make Money?

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Singapore Tech Blogs

When I was in Business School, instead of WallStreet Journal or Singapore Business Times, I was more interested in reading tech blogs (or some may call it tech publications). The regular ones that I followed closely and covers the Asia startup scenes are SGEntrepreneur, e27 and TechInAsia. (there are more now and you can get it from this Quora List)

Recently, e27 raised about US$615,000 to further expand their coverage in Southeast Asia. (Congrats Mohan! See e27.Team) Continue reading →