An Interview with Chua U-Zyn, the innovator behind Ping.Sg and TodayRSS

The academic’s definition of an entrepreneur is someone who creates a new innovation or redefines the business landscape of existing traditional businesses. This time round in our SG Entrepreneurs series, we manage to have an interview with Mr Chua U-Zyn, a young innovator to tell us about the story of his two latest innovations: Today RSS Feeds and Ping.sg.

SGE: Let’s start with the introduction. What is your name, your background and what are you currently doing?
U-Zyn: My name’s Chua U-Zyn. I have been fascinated by computers and technology since the first day I got a PC and have spent almost all my time awake trying to learn how things work. As I’m not quite a reader, I acquired most of my computing knowledge and skills via observations, by hacking or by trial and error. Believe it or not, I did not even own a single PHP book until about a month ago, when I got myself a book on advanced PHP5 (which I barely finish 2 chapters).

I am currently a Computer Engineering (Faculty of Engineering) undergraduate in National University of Singapore and also a freelance web developer. I’m not quite the studious kind of student. Most of my time are spent on either doing web development, or reading technology news/articles on the web. I’m not sure which one of the two activities I spent more time on – I’m a big procrastinator, but I’m sure any of these two activities takes up more time from me than studying.

SGE: What inspired you to be an innovator?

U-Zyn:My inspiration is simply my fascination with technology. Well, I do not really consider myself quite an innovator. Most of my ideas come from my own experience, for wanting to do something but could not. So it is nothing really that great. I did not sit down, stare at the wall for a couple of hours thinking about what to make next. Don’t innovators do that? I do have quite a list of ideas though, I would write it down whenever I encountered a situation stopping me from doing something and thought about the possible solution. Sadly, I do not have enough time to implement them all and also most of them are not even worth implementing anyway.

Oddly enough, like Archimedes, most of my ideas came about during the time when I shower. I guess I am not thinking enough during my normal times as I spend almost all my time awake coding, debugging and procrastinating, and only have time to do some thinking when I shower.

SGE: As you are known as the man who hacked Today, for the Today RSS feeds, how did you embark on your next invention, ping.sg?

U-Zyn:Haha. Thanks to Miyagi for giving me the name. I’m still not quite used to be known as that, but for now, I think I kind of like the name.

ping.sg is not my next invention. I have had the idea for over a year. The domain itself was registered in Dec 2005. And I had been wasting my time in lectures thinking about the model and the details of the project, even the logo. I can show you how many ‘ping’ logos that I have sketched on my lecture notes during the time of lecture.

Although I have had the idea for more than a year, not much work has been done since then. All I did a year ago was planning on the features of the community portal and how it could help creating a community for local bloggers on top of benefiting them. Due to my schoolwork and my freelance web development work, I only found time to work on ping.sg during the December vacation. At that time my idea was to code every single line by hand, minimalizing the use of any 3rd-party code (if I really really had to). I had also got my friend to help me on the layout design of ping.sg.

About 2 weeks later, I managed to complete the framework for ping.sg and implemented the AJAX-enabled live feature (similar to the current http://ping.sg/live) on the self-coded framework. My friend also submitted 2 drafts for the design to me. Unfortunately, I did not quite like the design and it wasn’t following standards. So I had to spend the next few weeks, juggling between my clients’ work (I have datelines too) and doing the design + logic for ping.sg.

I did not manage to complete it before semester resumed. During semester time, I could not have found sufficient time for my own development work after discounting the time spent on campus (after skipping about 70% of lectures) and doing clients’ work.