Product backend engineer from Singapore

Challenges in designing a great user onboarding experience

Designing a great onboarding, sign in experience is not easy because everyone is different and behaves differently. However, doing it well can put a smile on users’ face. For most B2C applications, onboarding should be quick, intuitive, easy to navigate. The key point is to offer a high value, frictionless experience with minimal effort.

I came across an article that describes common problems with login and its solutions, and another that talks about the rules for sign in experience. Both contain useful information to consider when designing the entire onboarding and sign in flow.

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API versioning: The inevitable breaking change in software

Career, Software engineering, System design

RESTful APIs are interfaces for computers to communicate with one another, and are ideally set in stone. However, even with great design knowledge and practices, demands and requirements of systems evolve over time, which may cause incompatibility with older versions. The use of API versioning helps to manage these incompatibilities, which also called breaking changes.

API versioning is a concept that I have heard of some time ago but did not realise its significance until I needed to implement them. It is also one of the concepts that are rather subjective in nature, with no single superior approach to rule them all.

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Pagination: The deceptively simple task

Database, Search, Software engineering

Pagination is the process of separating data into multiple discrete pages. In the context of web and mobile applications, this can either be in the form on numbered pages as seen in google search results or infinite scrolling in social media feed. The decision process behind choosing either approach is not the objective of this post, but rather it is about the implementation of the backend data flow.

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First software engineering role: A year in review

Career, Life

It has been 1 year 2 months since I started working full time in 2019 Feb 25. Much has happened at work, especially at a small company like mine where situations and decisions can change rapidly.

I thought this would be a good time to take a step back and recount the ups and downs in my first job so far.

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2020 outlook

Current affairs, Life

Just 1 month into 2020, several major incidents has happened, many of which are still ongoing.

Recently, the death of Kobe Bryant, his daughter and others from a helicopter crash shook the world.
Although I do not know a lot about Kobe, I watched several of his basketball matches on youtube during my secondary school days, and know him as the basketball shooting guard legend.
Every death makes us slow our lives and think about the meaning of life for a while, before resuming the daily routine.

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Distributed systems: A glance at designing data-intensive applications

Distributed system, Software engineering, System design

It is not a surprise that designing, building and maintaining huge distributed systems is no easy feat. But for me, what is surprising is the amount of knowledge of the problems that we are solving and technology tools that fall in place to enable the successful implementation of such systems.

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