Hello World
More than 15 years ago, I took the first plunge to buy my own domain bryanchua.com out of my pocket money as a kid. I still vividly remember that I do not have any computer at home and the smartphone-then is nowhere near as good as today’s smartphones. Through sheer luck, I came across this idea of creating something with HTML and CSS in the World Wide Web (WWW) at the age of 16 while doing a typical science project in seconday school. If I want to learn how to build a website, I have to stay behind in school and I remember how I was in constant shocked at what I can do with just coding. I learnt how to use HTML to build tables, paragraphes and links all by myself with examples. Back then, my cousin knew about it and she gave me a book Apache, PHP and MySQL which triggered even more interests inside me. More importantly, I have not regretted ever since and it has been an incredible journey. Fast forward till today, we have a long list of technologies, tools and frameworks available that can provide so much more values and have more time for even-more meaningful works. In this humble space, I hope I can document down as much as I can on my learnings, experience and projects.
About
Oh hey - I am Bryan Chua, just another tech guy from Singapore that always explores new technologies and how they can potential, lack of the better terms, change the world better by creating values. I am an engineer, technology leader and Chief Technology Officer and co-founder for 3 companies (ShopBack, RaveSquare/Buffet Mania and Ronzaro) that are co-founded with other partners & friends. After my 8 years roller coaster ride in my entrepreneurship journey and getting my company to series B funding, I sought to find something more challenging, more meaningful in life and more impactful to the world/communities.
Today, I work as a Senior Solutions Architect in Amazon Web Service (AWS) and my goal is to help as many startups, small-medium and digital-native companies to scale and provide guidances/advices to fellow CTOs or tech leads, engineers and even businesses. I am personally into app development, specifically in container technologies. And do feel free to catch-up with me for coffee (if you are in Singapore) or watch my Githuh projects.
Outside work
When I am not at my desk writing codes or talking to customers, I am a photographer who is looking at the world with a different pair of eyes - the lens, of course! On any given day, I will be somewhere in the nature - park, garden or beach. I am recently focusing more in bird photography where I find migrating birds that temporarily move to Singapore for a few weeks to have some warm.
You can follow me in my instagram to see more.
Technologies and services behind v3.0
Simple. This website is built using Jekyll. I specifically chose a template (minimal-mistake) to customise according to my needs and I love how clean and minimal it is. I am hosting the site via Netlify for free. Github, Github Pages and git-flow are the natural choice of development, at least for me, and this workflow is easy to integrate with Netlify. Deploying Jekyll on Netlify is easy, thanks to their Netlify tutorial.
What is next
I have been toying with the ideas of writing my own blog for a few years and ultimately, I have decided to do once a while because of the stories I wrote in Medium. Seeing how the posts actually helped many, I was overwhelmed by the number of emails written to me asking for more (many thanks for the encouragements, everyone). I also want to point out clearly that the contents I wrote in my personal accounts and websites are solely on my own and do not express the views or opinions of my job/employer. And also, I am not in the Developer Advocate job for any technologies. In another words, these are for my personal learnings, documenting my lessons learnt and sharing my experience building new things.