Archive - May 30, 2019

Back in 2016, I was feeling bored developing and maintaining websites for a number of disparate clients. Actually, we hardly did any new development; it was more maintenance, dealing with security issues from code written by other people, and providing random IT support on the side because clients expected it as part of the package.

After observing that my local doctor in Singapore was still using paper records, I was inspired to look into health tech, and ended up applying for a master’s degree course in health informatics, in New Zealand. Come 2019, I have this shiny new degree, but responses from district health boards and companies in the health tech space in Auckland was not forthcoming (or just slow, since I did get invited for interviews… after I accepted the job), and I ended up highlighting the “informatics” part of my degree to land myself a data engineer job at a point of sale software company.

So now, I decided to start this blog with the idea of recording and reflecting on my journey into this area. My postgraduate study gave me some overview into data science, and my background as a software engineer gives me the software skills, yet data engineering kind of lies at an intersection between the two, so it will be interesting to see where this leads me. The HIVERY tagline of “Data has a better idea” (photo by Franki Chamaki on Unsplash) is not literally true, of course: data does not have ideas of its own, but in a sense I am hoping that it was a better idea to go into data engineering than to stick with more mainstream software engineering.