The past (achievements)

Chinese New Year was relatively early this year and the fortunes were displayed across Singapore. I checked my fortunes and most of them generally have the same forecasts - I would have a good year career wise. That is true to a certain extent.

I studied hard and passed AWS Solutions Architect Associate (SAA-C03) exam in April 2024. That was a year plus since I passed AWS Cloud Practitioner exam in February 2023. Despite the challenging exam and my lack of computer science knowledge, it was a good experience as I gained valuable basic knowledge. It did help me to better understand the entire tech flow and how the different teams/components work together. With that knowledge, I am able to contribute more meaningfully at work.

Besides that, I also studied and passed the AWS Developer Associate (DVA-C02) exam last week. I decided to take the exam because my current role as a developer for the CHAMP chatbot deals with AWS serverless resources, especially AWS Lambda, DynamoDB and Amazon Athena. It helped me to see the gaps within our architecture, particularly the end to end monitoring, and now I could better address them to improve the overall architecture and stability of the application.

That was more on my career side. In my personal life, I took some time off to travel the world and expanded my horizon. I travelled to South Africa for 2 weeks and I saw how modern they are. They are not as “kampong” as the social media depicts them to be. They are well connected to the world with Internet, contactless payment etc. I went on game drives to see the wild life up close and personal, saw penguins and had a better understanding of the Apartheid history.

I also went on short trips to Bangkok, Hong Kong and Guangzhou. Once again, I was amazed by how developed and advanced they are. Me being a former Malaysian and now a Singapore citizen, I thought Singapore would be the top tier in terms of advancement and these cities couldn’t compete. Boy oh boy, I was very wrong. They are as advanced, or maybe even more advanced, than Singapore is.

The present (failures)

This year, I decided to learn Golang. There is no particular reason to learn Golang other than I want to learn a new programming language besides Python. I did source for free online resources and have spent some time learning it but I did not go beyond that. Basically I effectively did not pick up a new programming language. So I see that as a failure to my learning.

Age is catching up and as I got more busy with work, it can be quick easy to neglect one’s health - be it mental or physical health. Despite failing to prioritize my health in the first 3 quarters of the year, I am slowly building up the regular routine to hit the gym in the morning before heading to work. It can be challenging when you always have meetings in the morning and I would always have to rush my workout routine.

At the start of the year, I had a plan to build a supermarket chatbot. The idea is that the user is able to interact with the chatbot to get latest prices of an item across different supermarkets such as Fairprice, Sheng Siong, Cold Storage and Giant. I have been collecting the prices from various webpages on regular basis throughout the year but I failed to processed the collected data into a structured format and building the chatbot.

The future (plans)

For next year, I have 3 5 main objectives:

Pass AWS Machine Learning Specialty (MLS-C01) exam. I am looking to transition into MLOps and roles that would allow me to develop and deploy AI solutions, this exam would be a good compliment. Also given the fact that I have prior ML/DL knowledge and also prior experience in developing ML/DL solutions, it would be a waste to not get this certificate.
Learn and develop a small Golang application. The Go app could be done in work or for my personal project. This is still undecided.
Build a regular workout routine. This is especially important given that my role is quite a desk bound role and it is very important and beneficial to build this healthy lifestyle early so that I could live a long life.

EDIT: Added these 2 after posting

Build a simple Supermarket Chatbot.
Post regularly on my github blog