I have spent the first quarter of my life studying! 6 years in primary school, 4 years in secondary school, 3 years in Singapore Polytechnic (SP), 2 years and 2 months serving my nation, 3 years 6 months in National University of Singapore (NUS). Finally, it is time for me to step out to the working world and complete the other half of my life.

My last paper ended back on 3rd December 2009, went to Taiwan for my graduate trip from 7th to 13th December 2009 and went to Hong Kong with Li Xiang from 19th to 27th December 2009. Sent out my resumes to OCBC, UOB, SingTel, Matador, CSIT and Crimson Logic for the last 3 months but did not get a reply.

I was recommended by David to Andy who said his company, mig33 Pte Ltd, is looking for a web developer and David asked me to contact Andy personally. So I thought why not give it a try, so I sent my resume to Andy and Andy forwarded it to his bosses. Thanks to Andy for endorsing and putting good words for me, I manage to get an interview last Thursday, 28th January 2010 at 3pm. The interview was pretty technical which I like because it really tests your skills and experience in that area rather than just looking at your CAP or grades and judge everything based on that.

Came back at 4pm and at 5.49pm, I got an email saying that I got the job as a Web Engineer at mig33! I was really over the moon! It is my first full-time job! The feeling is definitely better than striking 4D or ToTo!

It is such a coincidence that mig33 is located at The Central Office 1 building which is just beside my internship company, Sedgwick Richardson, which is located in Office 2 building (they both share the same lobby)

mig33 is the largest mobile chat community, connecting millions of mobile friends all around the world! You can find out more about mig33 at http://mig33.com/.

On the day that I got the job, I posted a blog post entitled All Good Things Must Come To An End on my WordPress blog.

Just in case you miss it, let me paste it down here:

As you all know, I have been doing WordPress plugins and supporting it for the past 6 years. These 6 years of my life, I have been through my polytechnic education, my national service as well as my university education.

I just graduated from university in December 2009 and have been jobless for 2 months. However, things change for the better. I was offered a full-time job and will be starting work this coming Monday on the 1st February 2010.

I regret to say that I am not able to provide support for my plugins anymore due to my full-time job commitment. I will leave my WordPress plugins support forums open and let the community help one another.

However, I will still update my plugins when I can and you still can report bugs to me via email and I will try to fix it.

The comments I have gotten are very positive and I would like to thank everyone for their support and encouragement! You rock WordPress community!

My internship with Sedgwick Richardson ended last Friday exactly on the 31st July 2009. This week is my one week school holiday before my school starts on the 11th August 2009.

This will be my final semester and finally I can get to click on the “File for Graduation” tomorrow after the modules that I bid have been allocated to me.

Having working for the past 2 1/2 months making me realize that my study time is precious! On average, I only go to school for 2 hours lecture daily as compared to working from 9am to 6pm daily! Of course the pros of working is that you will have greater spending power because you definitely earn more than your monthly allowance.

I would like to share my experience working with designers, project managers and clients. Programmers are lazy. Laziness is a form of efficiency. There are limitations to everything, computer cannot do wonders. But sometimes, clients fail to see the point of it.

Timimg and schedule is also important, client wants everything because they want to make the money paid worth it. But sometimes it is not because we do not stick to the schedule but client take ages to get back to you something simple and hence your whole schedule is screwed.

There are many types of designers and programmers. Some programmers are good in web while some are good with software. The same can be said for designers, some are good with print media while some are good with the web. Designers like illustrator which is good for print media. But personally I think illustrator is not suitable to create web based templates. Photoshop is a better choice because it is raster based rather than vector based.

Signing off is must and we need to make sure that everybody respect the signing off especially the client. The project manager must enforce that. If we keep changing after signing off, it makes no difference whether we sign off or not. And in the end the designer and programmer will be pissed because they will have to keep changing.

Project managers must be well verse especially in the technical area on the project he is taking on. He must understand the programmer “language” and the designer “language” so that he can communicate on behalf of us to the client better.

So to conclude, what I have learned from this internship is that, clients are flicker minded, programmers are lazy, designers have temper issues and project mangers are the middleman who suffers in silence. Communication is the key to a successful project!

Started my internship with Sedgwick Richardson (Singapore) which deals with branding and design on Tuesday, 12th May 2009. My job is pretty straightforward but not an easy task. I covert AI/PSD files to HTML and followed by converting them into WordPress templates and of course the website will be powered by WordPress. Time seems to pass very fast there, perhaps I am busy for the whole day as there are many projects to rush. I love the flexibly here in terms of dress code as well as working hours. All they ask for, is for you to get the deliverable required by the project manager before the deadline.

Working life seems to be the total exact opposite of studying life, it seems that studying is so much more carefree than exams. Exams only happen once every 3 months and project deadline is probably twice every 3 months but when working there are like a few deadlines within the same week!

Sometimes (or rather that is the case), what you study is not really applicable to the working world. To me, it seems that working world requires you to have the skills needed to complete the job given to you and at most you have less than 1 week to pick up that skill.

Also, having facing the computer for more than 12 hours during work, the moment you step home, you will be totally shag and do not feel like switching on the computer and you would rather switch on the TV and let it entertain you instead.

Sleeping before 1am and waking up at 8am becomes the norm, which is good as it is a healthy lifestyle!

Even though working life is tough, but of course you will get paid and with money comes spending power.