Why this front-end dev won’t give you advice on how to start programming

Tech in Asia Jobs is a jobs platform connecting brands and digitally savvy talent. Search for jobs here, post jobs here.

Lim Chee Aun, 31, now works as a senior software engineer in Tech in Asia.

When Lim Chee Aun, 31, first started experimenting with code in 2001, he had no idea that what he was doing was called ‘programming.’

“I thought programming was something to do with a terminal, with a black background,” he said. “And you just keep typing, without knowing what you’re doing. I was just working on a white background, typing a few things and something happens. I thought these were just small things; it can’t be called programming.”

In fact, when someone asked Chee Aun then if he knew programming, he said no.

“It was only when I got into university that I said, wait, I already know this. That was when I realized these ‘if’s and ‘else’s were things people learned, and that was called ‘programming,'” he laughed.

Best known for organizing Kopi.JS and using government data to build transport apps, including TaxiRouter SG, Chee Aun worked in various startups, including video streaming platform Viki, before joining Tech in Asia as a senior software developer early this year. Chee Aun’s work focuses on front-end development.

The second Kopi.JS meetup in Chinatown in December 2013. Photo credit: Kopi.JS.

How it all started

“I was trying to figure out how websites worked,” Chee Aun said. “At that time, there was very little documentation on the internet. You’d always have to right-click and view source. Google was not much of a help then, there was at most a chunk of code that didn’t explain much anyway.

I learned through a lot of trial and error.

So I learned through a lot of trial and error. I used to spend a whole day figuring out a small chunk of code. I’d sleep, wake up, code, and do that for the whole day. I think that was how many people started out then.”

Chee Aun started by building a website on GeoCities. He later went on to contribute to the Firefox community by building third-party themes.

“I built about 10 themes for Firefox when I was in school,” he said. “That was a defining moment for me because that was the first time I was involved in an open-source community. I would talk to random people on those old-school forums, and people started getting to know me for my work in the Firefox community.

Notable projects

Inspiration

The state of engineering in Singapore

Advice to future developers