“The goal of your resume is to get a recruiter call. It’s a binary yes or no. That is the goal. As soon as you have your recruiter call, your resume doesn’t really matter that much." Gergely is a seasoned software engineer and engineering manager, previously worked in hypergrowth companies such as Uber, Skyscanner, and Skype. He is the author of “The Tech Resume Inside Out” book and “The Pragmatic Engineer” blog. In this episode, he shared about his interesting programmer-to-manager career journ...
Nov 16, 2020•58 min•Ep. 15
“Organizations should never set up a central digital transformation office. It should be owned by everybody in the organization. It’s not a CIO’s job. It’s the CEO’s job." Richard Koh is the CTO of Microsoft Singapore who played a major part in the Office 365 founding team. In this episode, I had an inspiring discussion with him around his journey founding the Office 365, the challenges he faced, and on how to approach digital transformation adoption. Our conversation started with some interesti...
Nov 09, 2020•50 min•Ep. 14
“Goal on the behaviors that matter. Don’t goal on your vanity metrics. Figure out what it is that, not just works for your product, but also for you as an individual." Crystal Widjaja is a startup growth advisor and a Forbes 30 Under 30. She was most recently the SVP of Business Intelligence and Growth for Gojek. She is also the co-founder of Generation Girl, a non-profit organization that introduces young girls to STEM. In this episode, I had a fascinating chat with Crystal on many things about...
Nov 02, 2020•1 hr 12 min•Ep. 13
“You can run an organization where you communicate clearly, and you treat people fairly, and you try to set people up for success. I have seen it work, and I can make that happen, and I remember that it is possible." Hongyi is the Director of Open Government Products, a division of the Government Technology Agency of Singapore. He leads an experimental team of engineers, designers, and product managers who build technology for the public good, such as Data.gov.sg, Parking.sg, FormSG, Go.gov.sg, ...
Oct 26, 2020•46 min•Ep. 12
“Courage needs to be emphasized even more in software development context. That’s related with respect. We cannot expect the developers will be courageous, to tell the truth, to have integrity, unless the organization, the management respect them as a professional." Joshua initially started his career as a software developer, but over time became more interested in the people aspect of software development, which then brought his interest in Scrum. He has a decade of experience as a Scrum Master...
Oct 19, 2020•39 min•Ep. 11
“As a leader, it’s not your responsibility to do. It’s your responsibility to teach and help your team to level up. Your job is to level up your team, so that you have a team of people who can do it better and faster." Trisha Gee is a Java Champion, author, and the leader of Java Developer Advocacy team at JetBrains. She has an extensive Java experience with expertise in Java high performance systems, and she is exceptionally passionate about sharing things that help real developers. Trisha is a...
Oct 12, 2020•56 min•Ep. 10
“A Tech Lead is a person with a technical background, typically an engineer who is leading a team and particularly responsible and accountable for their technical direction." Patrick Kua is a seasoned technology leader and is passionate about accelerating the growth and success of tech organizations and technical leaders. Before going independent recently, Pat was the CTO and Chief Scientist of N26 (Berlin, Germany), where he transformed the early stage startup culture and led the Product & ...
Oct 05, 2020•1 hr 4 min•Ep. 9
“There is no permanent failure and there is no guarantee of success either. What you define as success, what you define as failure is just a definition." Sau Sheong is the CEO of SP Digital, an energytech company, part of SP Group, the leading energy utility in Asia Pacific and one of Singapore’s largest corporations. In this episode, Sau Sheong shared with me about the digital transformation journey that he embarked in SP Digital, including some success and failure stories. His achievements dur...
Sep 28, 2020•43 min•Ep. 8
“Continuous Integration is when you are integrating with the other developers on the code base as soon as possible. Continuous Delivery is when your code is in a deployable state and functionally correct." In this episode, I had a long deep conversation with Sriram Narayanan (Ram for short), a Principal Consultant at ThoughtWorks Singapore. Ram is one of my mentors and someone that I always enjoy listening to for all his wisdom and vast amount of experience in the industry. Ram has an illustriou...
Sep 21, 2020•2 hr 38 min•Ep. 7
“The thing about becoming a Tech Influencer is, content is Queen and consistency, quality and value matter. That’s the trifecta of creating content that sticks." In this episode, I had a fun conversation with Stephanie Wong, a Developer Advocate from Google Cloud. Stephanie is well known for her online developer contents ranging from YouTube videos, podcast and blog posts. She also hosts her own YouTube channel called “Steph You Should Know” where she talks about career, tech and productivity ti...
Sep 15, 2020•45 min•Ep. 6
"With Infrastructure as Code, you’re not trying to kind of reverse engineer or understand what ended up somehow onto each system, you’re actually saying, this is how the system is built and because it’s built from that code. So there is no difference." In this episode, I had an in-depth discussion with Kief Morris, the author of the O’Reilly “Infrastructure as Code” book. We started from what is Infrastructure as Code and why we should implement this important concept for managing our infrastruc...
Sep 07, 2020•59 min•Ep. 5
"With the kind of security breaches and attacks that we are witnessing in this era, it becomes of prior importance that we prioritize security at the top." In this episode, I am joined by Neha Malhotra who has recently been awarded one of the Top 20 Women in Cybersecurity in Singapore 2020. Neha is deeply passionate about cybersecurity and has an extensive experience in driving initiatives across multiple cybersecurity domains. She is also very active in the cybersecurity community groups and ki...
Aug 31, 2020•43 min•Ep. 4
“Knowing and understanding are very different things. Unless I practice it along with good guidance, I may not increase my understanding." There are several Agile misconceptions in the industry lately. It has even come to a point where people are being skeptical and starting to doubt the actual value of Agile methodologies and practices. In this episode, I had a conversation with Stanly Lau, one of the early leaders of the Agile Singapore community, about these Agile misconceptions and what we c...
Aug 22, 2020•38 min•Ep. 3
Hear from Singapore's prominent community builder, Michael Cheng, on how to contribute to communities, and learn more about his latest passion for mentoring junior developers. _____ “Rather than being passive about it, why don’t I take a proactive approach to try and find people who are like-minded, who share the same ideals and goals and let them come together and just share." Michael Cheng has been a prominent community builder in Singapore, having created communities such as Engineers.SG, PHP...
Aug 11, 2020•40 min•Ep. 2
"Leading others is leading yourself first. That's a very big work of self awareness, and you should always do that." Jerome Poudevigne is a serial CTO who has co-founded multiple startups with multiple successful exits. Recently, he has been working at Google Cloud and AWS to help startups grow and make the most of cloud technologies. In this very first episode of Tech Lead Journal, Jerome shares with us his startup wisdom from his lessons learned; advice for hiring, building culture, pitching, ...
Aug 03, 2020•47 min•Ep. 1
"Great technical leadership requires more than just great coding skills. It requires a variety of other skills that are not well-defined." In this trailer episode, your host Henry Suryawirawan explains why he created this brand new podcast and what you can expect and learn from it. Like this episode? Subscribe on your favorite podcast app and submit your feedback . Follow @techleadjournal on LinkedIn , Twitter , and Instagram . Pledge your support by becoming a patron . For more info about the e...
Jul 14, 2020•3 min
