Get To Know Sigma School's Head of Frontend - Tim!
Sigma School
7th February 2024
Tim comes from a rather unorthodox background where he flew as a cabin crew with Singapore Airlines before career-switching and transitioning into a full stack developer.
He started his journey self learning when the pandemic struck and flights were hugely disrupted. Currently, he leads the frontend team at a HR software startup called Payboy in Singapore. He works with software architecture and designs, leading 2 other developers & helping the company transition into a scale up.
Tim is also an avid writer on Medium and teaches coding part time. He firmly believes in the nature of open source, giving back to the community that he loves.
As a young boy, Tim loved technology and everything there is to do about it. He was always fascinated with how technology works, how it could change lives of thousands with just several lines of code. When asked by his parents or elders, he would always reply: “I wanna be an inventor!”
He was always curious about how things work and why they work, which led him to breaking many electrical devices at home simply because he wanted to open it up and see the mechanisms behind it. Even when playing video games with his brother, he would sit in front of the TV for hours, meticulously trying to analyse how the combination of buttons would give him an advantage over his brother.
When he turned 16, his dad brought him to custom build his first ever PC and it really ignited his spark to dwell deep into the world of technology. Through this, he claimed himself a software geek as he was constantly trying to fiddle with games and their source code files.
He loved learning new things and always wanted to download the coolest new programs to try out new things, and self learn using software like Adobe Photoshop & Sony Vegas Pro. With those skills, he was recruited into his high school’s Computer Club.
When Tim was 16, he enrolled in a school exchange programme where he and a bunch of other students (mostly of those he met in the computer club) to an internship in University programme. The university taught them C#, building simple games using Unity Engine.
He thought that this was the potential of coding and how boring & mundane it is. Just staring at thousands of lines of code to achieve a small little feat.
Since coding was not an option, Tim decided to take a gap year after his A Levels to pursue flying and to “travel the world”. It was supposedly a one year affair, but because of the lavish lifestyle and stress free environment, he stayed in the air for almost 4 years.
When the pandemic struck the world, the aviation industry was hit the hardest. However, Tim was really happy because he knew he could use this opportunity to pursue something else in his life.
Since he already knew a bit of coding, he decided to give coding another try. He started with CodeAcademy’s Introduction to Python course. It was a make or break situation for him, because he just wanted to give it another try and if it was still as boring as he remembered, he would quit coding forever.
It was an extremely difficult and humbling journey. There were an overwhelming number of things to learn as a beginner that scare people away from the programming world. Fortunately, Tim has many experienced software engineer friends and friends from Reddit who helped guide his way towards where he is today.
Tim & Deric were good friends from high school and knew of Deric’s latest pursuit of trying to solve the current education system through Sigma School. They reconnected, talked about the potential partnerships and he was on board with Deric’s vision.
With Deric’s leadership and Tim’s expertise in the frontend, they believe Tim will deliver in providing the best possible curriculum for aspiring developers to go from zero to hero and learn what is needed in a developer's toolbelt.
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