Hey, I'm Khang

i've been in software engineering since 2008

you are reading a brief history of me

Mar2024

Started maintaining an HTTP-middleware supercharging library called oak-routing-ctrl

TC39 Decorators Proposal conformed
OpenAPI Spec fully supported

20,9 KB gzipped
production proven
semantically released & signed with sigstore
100% JavaScript Registry (jsr.io) score

Since Oct22

Staff Software Engineer @ Redcare Pharmacy

  • technical product ownership: help maintain technical specification alignment & conformity for 3 major corporate-wide projects each involving up to 20 colleagues from up to 4 remotely distributed teams
  • involved as a core team member on 2 greenfield architecture revamp projects touching k8s, istio, CI/CD, and TDD practices

Jun21-Sep22

Senior Software Engineer @ Redcare Pharmacy

  • maintain & improve the company's core e-commerce web shop serving customers across 7 European markets, especially Germany
  • work across backend (Node.js, Java, DBs) and frontend stacks (React, HTML, CSS, JS) on over 25+ repositories
  • improve DX & peer productivity via 2 live coding session streamed to 100+ engineering peers distributed across Germany, plus many 1-1 tutorial / quick-start guideline sessions
  • help uphold desirable team dynamics involving difficult conversations in 2 specific case scenarios

2021~2022

Kubernetes ecosystem deep-dives & more

In this period, I learned to:

  • install & maintain k8s from scratch on unix server farms
  • use k8s pod, deployment, replica set, hpa, configmap, (sealed) secret, kubectl and helm cli's
  • investigate logs, events & carry out k8s network troubleshooting fundamentals e.g. separate curl pod or describe resources
plus getting hands-on with Rust & Blockchain

Mar18-May21

Software Engineer @ Valsight

  • built low & high level React components used in 90+% of the UI of an enterprise-grade business modelling software
  • ensured desirable performance of hundreds of React components (per view) consuming remotely-fetched data
  • provided training to fellow junior engineers via pair-programming sessions or documented code examples, saving at least 1/4 of business hours per topic per engineer (should that engineer have to self-onboard)
  • worked with TypeScript, ReactJs-stack, ExtJs, d3js, enzyme, jest, webpack, Jira and Confluence platforms on a daily basis

Nov2017

Wrote my 1st serious Personal Webpage

but it wasn't mobile friendly, so you're now reading my 2nd serious Personal Webpage / CV ✌️

Oct2017

Moved to Europe

With my dear wife Quynh who accompanied me as we stormed the enviromental & cultural changes & survived our 1st harsh winter together on almost zero budget (boastworthy as we grew up in a tropical region)

Since Sep2017

Technology Consultant @ Digital Power Media

  • designed system architecture for the company's initial flagship product, which was positively vetted by a tech-savvy investor
  • pushed for a low # of single points of failure for the organization via a series of difficult conversations as part of a technical due-diligence process
  • maintained developer onboarding experience and tech culture via mentoring activities for a team of size 4
  • set up & advised on rudimentary foundational CI/CD flows with Bash & GitLab Pipelines. Engineering peers were able to spend less time on deploying and more on fine-tuning the product
  • provided on-demand technical consultation to the management board on topics ranging from vetting ideas to general acceptance / due-diligence checks

Mar16-Aug17

Technical Lead @ Raydar

  • helped secure funding for the company (additional SGD $100.000 during my tenure)
  • formed & led an engineering team up at the size of 5 as we developed and maintained a web-based stock photo search-engine running on a microservice architecture utilizing Elasticsearch, Node.js, ReactJs-stack, 3rd-party stock photo APIs, and Stripe payment API
  • built in-house tools to help with staging / production deployments, long-running / scheduled background jobs
  • managed CI/CD & site-reliability: an uptime of at least 95% was maintained during my tenure
  • addressed customer payment-related issues by analyzing internal and 3rd-party system logs; PROD issues were resolved in avg. under 2 business days
  • communicated with engineering peers from stock photo suppliers / API partners from Asia, Europe and the USA to uphold API usage agreements; PROD issues were resolved in avg. under 2 business days

Oct08-Feb16

1st 8 yrs of Career

Moulded in different business environments, startup to medium-sized corporate, spanning the industries: Digital Creative & Marketing, Online Entertainment, EdTech, Infrastructure & Hosting, I worked a variety of technical roles, both as IC and people manager, some including business management, customer and shareholder interfacing, and fund raising

In this period, I sharpened client-side & server-side software development knowhows, plus Linux server management, system scalability, and cloud engineering backgrounds

Major skills I attained at industrially productive level: PHP, ActionScript, CSS, Computer Graphics Manipulation & Animation, JavaScript, Node.js, Apache, Nginx, Linux Server Management, Geo-aware web-scaled software, On-Premise and Cloud-based software deployments

A memorable achievement was in 2011, when I managed a farm of 6 physical Ubuntu machines consuming a 1hr-long live-broadcast media stream for a concert event originating from South Korea and re-broadcasting it to up to 3000 concurrent viewers across the 1600 km length of Vietnam.

2012

Released SephPlayer

This was among the earliest web-embedable media players to be released to the public domain. Written in ActionScript 3.0 (an ECMA-family computer language created by Adobe Inc.), it was once a full-fledged video player for the web and served its purposes well for its market during this "dismal" age of the WWWW, when HTML5 hadn't been born and Adobe Flash still reigned the interactive media market. This was fun to write and I'm forever proud to have worked on it

May2011

Started my Tech Blog

Psss: I have a non-tech blog too, but let's keep this strictly 🤓 professional

Nov2009

Graduated from @ RMIT, Bachelor (hasta la vista 🎓)

Got a full scholarship. I think I did ace the application round, but my luck aced even more

Happy to have pursued my enthusiasm in digital media & IT, which I still enjoy doing today

~15 yrs old

Deployed my 1st web app

It was actually an Invision Power Board forum. Very PHP, much Apache, wow

~13 yrs old

Self-taught image manipulation (Adobe Photoshop)

This event steered my life into the digital creative track, for better or worse 😉

~9 yrs old

Started my 1st piano lessons

My proudest on-record footage eva since

Past Life

I might have role-played as a romance writer in my n-1th reincarnation, where I would definitely send a ❤️ forwarded through time to Hassan Kamal for the original timeline theme, upon which this page was built

© est. 2024, thesephi[at]gmail[dot]com