In 2020, I founded a company called OpenRegulatory. At that time - the height of the pandemic, with low interest rates and near-unlimited funding - most startups were rocket ships - VC-funded, growth-oriented and, most notably, not profitable. I wanted OpenRegulatory to be different - bootstrapped by me, small, profitable - more like a tuk-tuk. Now, while you’re chuckling, I assure you, this metaphor holds better than you might think. Imagine a rocket ship trying to find its way through the back alleys of a major city like Bangkok. Not possible! It’s way too big and sluggish. The tuk-tuk, on the other hand, is small and agile and has no problem cruising through the maze of sois.

Back in 2017, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I got my first coding job, I was super excited about Clojure. And what’s there not to be excited about? It’s super fast, it’s concise, and it’s a lisp. But now I’m coding in Ruby. Why?

In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel writes: It’s easier to copy a model than to make something new: doing what we already know how to do takes the world from 1 to n, adding more of something familiar. But every time we create something new, we go from 0 to 1. The act of creation is singular, as is the moment of creation, and the result is something fresh and strange.

In the beginning of 2020, I left my job at Vara, where I worked as a Software Engineer, Soccer Mom and Regulatory Affairs Person. I didn’t really know what to do next. While I enjoyed the Coding and Soccer Mom Duties, one thing was for sure: No more regulatory work, ever.

I’m back from cryosleep. After leaving Merantix Healthcare 7 months ago I haven’t been writing much. I took the summer off to finish my pilot’s license and to try out a few things on the side.

Today is my last day at Merantix Healthcare.

Let’s look at how most software is developed. I’m not talking about those shiny SaaS products like Slack. Those were built for developers, by other developers. No, I’m talking about the large underwater iceberg of boring software running enterprises, governments, hospitals and nuclear reactors. Real-world software. Software outside the Silicon Valley tech bubble.

Machine Learning is everywhere. Unfortunately. Most industries aren’t ready for it.

In the everlasting quest of optimizing my sleep, I recently started measuring air quality in my bedroom. I hope to write up the setup at a later time; here, I’ll focus on some surprising results.

Recently, one of my posts made Hacker News #1. That brought back childhood memories.

I’m currently reading Range by David Epstein [1].

Interacting with businesspeople never ceases to amaze me. They presume that they’re qualified to run companies. Why? Because they are businesspeople.

Zigbee-enabled light bulbs. Wifi-connected air purifiers. Autonomous thermostats. The smart home. Great technology. And just like with machine learning and blockchain, we humans don’t quite know yet what to do with it yet.

The Hacker’s First Project

It’s a long weekend, I’m standing in my flat, 10 lenses scattered across the desk in front of me. I’m wearing weird glasses consisting of an empty plastic frame and some lenses stuck into it. I squint out of the window, trying to read number plates of cars parked in the street.

Imagine the following: You have a pool of workers. Each worker should get an item from a queue and process it.

Push vs. Pull notifications

As a coder, concentration and mental focus become very important. Writing code is a very brain-intense activity which makes daily fluctuations of mental focus very obvious.

As a kid, I became obsessed with my sleep. When I couldn’t fall asleep, I panicked - oh no, I’m not getting enough sleep for school tomorrow! As a good Asian kid, that thought was very scary.

After graduating from Medical School, I started working at a startup as a software engineer. While I did learn a lot of things in this time, one thing which sticks out particularly is asking stupid questions.

Doing some HTTP requests is usually one of the first things I do when I’m learning a new language (apart from comparing its performance in highly artificial benchmarks and checking whether it scales).

So you want to get in on the hot new stuff and decided it’s time to learn Docker. Good on you! Docker is the new kid on the block which allows you to containerize stuff. Well, not really - it’s not that new at all. I tend to miss these pieces of software which emerge from the darkness of the interwebs, silently creeping around behind me until they suddenly establish themselves as some sort of standard and everybody except me uses them.

Fully automated Breast Segmentation on Mammographies

Sometimes I miss the old days in which you could simply yank out a bad PHP script interspersed with some HTML and - bezonga - you had a website. Since then, things have become somewhat more complicated.

After living in Bangkok for 4 months and having worked as an intern in Siriraj Hospital, here’s my take on “how to get around Bangkok and enjoy the attractions without being a bozo tourist”.

I would really, really love to be able to like Cloud Code. The idea of simplifying any backend into one unified platform with push-capabilities and node.js-style extendability sounds awesome.

Oh wow, now this is really neat.