Life in the army

I was called back in November 2022, before I could complete my first year of my Software Engineering degree at UNSW in Sydney. To be frank with you, I was very annoyed at the prospects of having my studies delayed by 2 years for something that I felt served absolutely no purpose. Why would Singapore ever go to war with anyone? Given that the punishment for not turning up was prison time, I grudgingly came back to serve.

My first few months in Basic Military Training (BMT) were quite the eyeopener, learning to share a bunk with 12 other guys from all different walks of life. It was reassuring that some of them were in the same situation as me - coming back from overseas just to serve. The whole experience was entirely new to me, and the definite highlight (wrong word - most memorable?) was going on a 5D4N outfield in the dense jungles. Firing the SAR21 rifle at the range and throwing a live grenade were some other moments that I'll always take with me. After 4 months of training, we passed out as Privates and were sent to various training schools around Singapore to be trained in our new vocation.

I was to be trained as an Automotive Technician specialising in armoured tracked vehicles such as the Hunter AFV. This was another entirely different environment with a very hands-on skillset, and let me be the first to tell you that I'm the complete opposite of that. We learned how to troubleshoot and identify parts on the vehicle, and really learn the inner workings of it. After about 3 months of this we passed out and were sent to Sungei Gedong camp, which was possibly the worst place to be if you were a soldier in the SAF. Singapore is always rightfully praised for how convenient everything is - but this camp was literally in the only part of Singapore still covered in jungle and plantations.

As fate would have it, when we got there the new unit mentioned that they were looking for people interested to be in their new social media trial. Naturally, I raised my hand. Soon after, they appointed me the new media clerk and I was to ditch my technician coveralls for the No.4 uniform to be worn in the office, which is where I am today. I have about 11 months left as of this article being published, and then I'm off back to Sydney!

Cut to the chase - what is the blog about?

Simply put, it's for me to jot down all my honest thoughts as I continue to learn the ins and outs of the developer world, and something I can refer to in the future if I ever forget how to center a div or invalidate a Cloudfront distribution.

I got my start in programming when I was in Year 9 in high school, when they made us take a module which was an introduction to Python. I was instantly drawn to the problem-solving aspect, as I found myself spending hours every week on the weekly problem sets, such as writing a substitution cypher or drawing a turtle. The satisfaction I got from running the tests and showing that it passed are something that I can't get enough of.

I decided that I wanted to make it as a career. With the encouragement of my dad - a software engineer himself - I enrolled at UNSW for a Bachelor's in Software Engineering (SENG). My first SENG course was COMP1511, a formal introduction to programming, similar to my Year 9 course. It was here where I was introduced to C, which for me, after only having experience in Python was a completely different playing field. What were all these curly braces for? Why is a semi-colon needed for each line? What the hell's a malloc? I'm not gonna sit here and pretend that I'm some C wizard, but it was very useful to learn what was going on closer to the hardware. Also, linked lists are cool.

COMP1521 was all about systems, and it was here where I got a taste of Assembly - very interesting topic, but one that I'm not sure I will come back to any time soon.

Funnily enough, the most fun I had so far was not from any uni class. During my time in the army my dad introduced me to something called the Cloud Resume Challenge. The premise was to deploy a static website with your resume on it, hosted on AWS and using various AWS services to make use of serverless architecture. Going through this challenge helped me add many tools to my toolbox - for front-end it was learning HTML, CSS and Javascript, and for the back-end using Python, AWS Lambda and DynamoDB. It also taught me the importance of writing quality tests, and design principles to look out for when desigining the aesthetics of your website UI (responsiveness), as well as CI/CD (my personal favourite).

This entire challenge was probably the most significant project I have done, so it deserves its own article (probably the next one - so keep your eyes peeled!)

Future Plans

With this challenge under my belt, I'm quite drawn to the area of full-stack development. I like the idea of knowing both front-end and back-end, even though as of now I do enjoy back-end a little bit more. I'm looking to create a dynamic website and play around with them, and having a taste of the "serverful" approach rather than serverless to see which one I like better. Serverless is definitely a cool concept but I felt that it has some drawbacks which I will elaborate on in the next article.

So that's a little bit about me, and I hope you got some insight into myself as a person and why I've decided to enter the developer world. Hope you'll stick around. See you in the next one!