Career

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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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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In review: 3 months probation

Career, Life

It has been 3 months since I started my first job, and I have to thank my manager for all the learning opportunities that are given to me, both technical and non-technical.

Software engineering: More than just coding

Career, Software engineering

It has been a month since I started work as a new graduate.

My company, which is a new subsidiary of a bigger group, is set out to capture the consumer F&B market. It is going to be an exciting and fast-paced ride this year, as plans to incrementally roll out the system have already been proposed and the real has just begun last week.

Lessons from interviews to first job

Career, Life

The hunt for my first job was a long journey. It started in late September 2018, and extended to mid February 2019.

In the first phase interviews from September to November 2018, I contacted around 6 companies and was shortlisted and accepted by one of them.

Generally, things went well and I was en route to start my first job some time in early January 2019 after a short probation at a company.
But a situation cropped up and I decided to move on and continue my job search, which saw me applying to at around 20 more companies.