About Me

I was homeschooled at the age of 10 — soon after, I found Minecraft which was ever-present during my early teenage years. I wasn't introduced to programming through Minecraft but growing up as a homeschooled lad in the 2010s, making friends with people all over the world through video games and producing YouTube videos was an extraordinary experience.

Fast forward to the present — I have been working remotely since joining IKHLAS in March 2023. Some of my achievements at IKHLAS and from the past can be found below as you scroll down the page.

I love to read — my favourite book is 1984, and a few of my favourite authors are Jeffrey Archer, George Orwell, and Alexander McCall Smith.

I have a diverse taste in music — a few of my favourite bands are Oasis, Franz Ferdinand, and Manic Street Preachers. I'm also a regular attendee of the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra.

Experience

IKHLAS

Software Engineer II

Some of my achievements:

  • Laid the foundations for a flexible booking experience

    • Provides the ability for HaloGo affiliate users to place Umrah bookings and view booking details post-checkout without having AirAsia accounts
    • Viewing booking details post-checkout without having AirAsia accounts has been adopted by the IKHLAS Sahabat programme
  • Lessened the load on Qurban Operations team

    • Makes it possible for the team to associate orders with proof links from external sources just by clicking a button
    • Makes it possible for the team to trigger proof status updates on numerous orders at once
  • Taking advantage of BrowserStack's free trial to identify and resolve visibility issues for Chrome users on Android devices

    • Missing CSS and media files, and missing AirAsia header component were happening on 5 of IKHLAS' Next.js applications
    • Because the issue happens only for Chrome on Android, I looked around for a tool that would allow me to identify the issue because there is no straightforward way to view DevTools on a phone
  • A swift decision preventing unwanted issues and inconvenience for Qurban Operations team and customers

    • When viewing the IKHLAS mobile app in Malay, we found out that the whole cow checkout was able to proceed even without participant names tallying up to portion tally of 7. My manager and the product manager weren't reachable at the time. Based on my teammate's sharing on how the prevention works when viewing in English, I made the decision to set the Qurban product's Malay title to the English equivalent so the prevention happens when the customer's locale is Malay
  • Came up with Strapi guides for managing content

    • Explains quirks specific to Strapi based on my experience playing around with Strapi
    • Recorded videos demonstrating creation of articles and preview mode for blog
  • Came up with CMS migration blueprint

    • Successfully laid down detailed-level blueprint for importing content from Contentstack to Strapi
    • Blueprint covers importing records, associating records, and naming of fields crucial for importing
    • Blueprint has been applied in 3 of IKHLAS Next.js applications
  • Contributed to cross-company initiatives

    • AirAsia DevOps announced new method of authorization for installing internal dependencies
      • I took the initiative to experiment, to make it work and to document the approach for IKHLAS codebases to adhere to the new authorization method
      • Word spread that IKHLAS managed to make the necessary changes, especially since the examples DevOps provided were hard to grasp. People from AirAsia SNAP team and the now-disbanded Holidays team reached out to me for guidance

No work day is ever the same. I could be pair-programming with fellow engineers; wearing my detective's coat to debug extraordinary issues; reviewing code; writing documentation; brainstorming with product, commercial and marketing departments; or collaborating with people from other AirAsia companies.

Sabbatical

Initially, I went on a 4-month sabbatical to enjoy life's simple pleasures but I decided to extend for the whole of 2022.

During the sabbatical, I learnt about money; I massively improved my health through taking care of my light environment and not eating at night; I read lots of books. My goals in life changed, too.

Shortcut Asia (formerly Suria Labs)

Full-Stack Developer

I worked on 8 internal and client projects. Here are some of my achievements:

  • Developed a solution to associate a deal with an email template on AirAsia Deals, providing the ability to use unique templates during marketing campaigns
  • Contributed to the internationalisation of AirAsia Activities. I was responsible for implementing internationalised routing that follows airasia.com's routing standards, and giving users the ability to switch the language
  • Fixed a high-priority bug on AirAsia Deals by utilising Sentry to trace the bug, not more than a few hours after I was drafted into the project. This bug was preventing testers from making payments in a non-MYR currency
  • Lead the implementation of features for the mobile app of Oslo Mikrobuldreri as I was the sole developer with prior experience in using React Native. User interfaces were built whilst practicing Atomic Design principles, ensuring easier maintenance of code and design system
  • Implemented a feature to determine the freshness of the shopping cart on clicking submit payment on AirAsia Activities, ensuring up-to-date pricing and availability before user makes a payment
  • Increased the speed of AirAsia Activities' test suite by 61.27%. This was achieved by applying best practices and using profilers and helpers provided by a Ruby tests profiling toolbox
  • Implemented a feature for admins to set a cut of time (in days) for activities on AirAsia Activities to prevent last-minute bookings
  • Implemented an importer on AirAsia Activities that imports categories of activities provided by one of the platform's partners, Viator. These categories are then mapped to AirAsia's own categories
  • Implemented the ability to run data validations with taxation logic that differ yearly on smec.io, making use of single-responsibility principle in order to isolate the relevant validation for each year

Shortcut Asia (formerly Suria Labs)

Intern Full-stack Developer

This is my very first experience of working. A month before the internship started, I learnt Ruby and Ruby on Rails as they're the technologies used in projects. I worked on 3 projects throughout my internship which gave me a priceless introduction to working in tech.

Skills & Technologies

  • Languages: Ruby; JavaScript; Elixir
  • Frameworks: Ruby on Rails; React.js; Next.js; Phoenix
  • Tools & Platforms: Git; Cloudflare Workers; Cloudflare Rules; Google Cloud Run; Hasura

Education

Homeschool

Circadian Biology

I love learning about circadian biology. I recommend you to check out this podcast: Regenerative Health Podcast with Max Gulhane, MD: Alexis Cowan, PhD on Sunlight, Mitochondria & Decentralized Science