Lee Kah Leong
.NET Ninja
1. Please tell us a bit about yourself, your current role, and your background
Hi, my name is Kah Leong. I have been a software engineer for the past 16 years. 11 years ago I would say I specialised only in front-end development. However, about 5 years ago I transitioned into a full stack developer coding primarily in JavaScript for front-end and .NET for back-end. I have been upskilling myself recently in Cloud and DevOps involvement(?) because I would like to branch out to develop new skillsets and portfolio.
2. How do you keep up with the latest trends or developments in your field of expertise?
I keep up with latest trends through newsletters, particularly from Medium.com cause of the list of articles on a daily/weekly basis. Those sorts of contents would also be great for new programmers to learn different style of coding and spark creativity.
3. How do you balance quality, speed, and innovation in your work when you're faced with time constraints especially with tight deadlines?
It is pretty hard finding the right balance when juggling between quality and innovation when working around tight datelines. I personally don’t think we can have both at the same time, because tight datelines do not allow creative freedoms. Hence, I think it’s important to understand from the company what are can be compromisedable and work around updating or releasing new patches to fix them later that note down on the tech debts that were compromised and return to fixing them later.
4. How do you think technology advances will impact your job?
I would say that AI’s impact isnt tremendous to a point it will overtake our jobs. However, I have found it to be a very useful tool because it helps me when I am facing challenges. I would advocate for these tools be integrated into organisations as it would help to elevate the organisation’s technology level.
5. What inspired you or drove you to pursue to pick up the (Programming Language) ?
I have been coding with .NET for the past 16 years because of my first company. I am currently involved and further upskilling myself with other stacks such as JavaScripts and DevOps.
6. What is one advice you would give to aspiring Software Engineers of tomorrow.
One advice I would give to aspiring engineers are to firstly learn the basics and fundamentals of programming languages. It works similarly to a tool, if you know how to effectively use a tool then its beneficial to you.
