Me

Lester Chan

Lester Chan

Tech Blogger · WordPress Plugin Author · Singapore

I am an engineering leader and software engineer with over two decades of experience building scalable products, high-throughput platforms, and open-source software.

Currently, I lead a distributed engineering team at Grab, where we build and scale payment infrastructure that powers driver payouts, fee management, MDR computation, and transaction processing across Southeast Asia. My focus is on designing reliable systems that operate at scale while enabling businesses to move money efficiently and securely.

Before Grab, I was Head of Engineering at Tech in Asia, where I led the engineering organization and oversaw the platform's technology strategy. In addition to managing the team, I was responsible for scaling Tech in Asia's WordPress-powered publishing platform and developing custom solutions to support its growth across media, events, and jobs.

Beyond my professional work, I have been an active contributor to the WordPress ecosystem since 2003, shortly after WordPress was forked from b2. I maintain multiple open-source projects and have published 21 plugins in the WordPress Plugin Repository (profiles.wordpress.org/gamerz), including widely adopted plugins such as WP-PageNavi, WP-Polls, WP-DBManager, WP-Sweep, WP-PostViews, and WP-PostRatings.

I am a strong advocate for open source and believe in building software that benefits the broader community. Most of my projects are publicly available on GitHub (github.com/lesterchan) and continue to be used by developers and websites worldwide.

Outside of engineering, I am also the founder of lesterchan.net, where I write about technology and gadgets. Over the years, my work has earned recognition as one of Singapore's most influential technology blogs.

My interests span engineering leadership, payments, open source, developer communities, technology, and consumer gadgets.

State of lesterchan.net

lesterchan.net began in April 2002 as the GamerZ Personal Homepage, a student site I built to learn web development. It started on b2, the software WordPress was forked from in 2003, and I have run it on WordPress ever since, today on a custom plugin and theme of my own.

More than two decades and over 3,400 posts later, the site has grown up alongside me. The early years were a personal diary: school, friends, the 2002 and 2006 World Cups, and the gadgets I saved up for. Over time the focus narrowed to what I know best, consumer technology and gadgets, reviewed by someone who actually buys and lives with them.

Today it is, at heart, a Singapore gadget blog. The largest sections are mobile phones, cases and docks, batteries and power, networking, and smart home, behind hundreds of hands-on reviews. I write about the Apple ecosystem I live in, the UniFi network that runs my flat, the Aqara and HomeKit gear that automates it, and whatever travel router or charger I most recently talked myself into buying.

Running in parallel is the open-source side. I have contributed to WordPress since 2003 and maintain 21 plugins in the official repository, including WP-PostViews, WP-Polls, WP-PageNavi, WP-DBManager, and WP-PostRatings, used on sites worldwide.

Twenty-four years on, lesterchan.net is still self-hosted, still hand-built, and still mine: a living archive of what I was using, thinking, and buying at any given point.