Actual article date: Jan 27, 2016

Hi, we’re Dewin and Ming Foong, ex-interns of Jublia! Both of us worked on the tech team under CTO Chinab for a period of 2 months.

The Experience
Neither of us had a coding background — (Me) Dewin came from Accountancy, while Ming Foong was from Chemical Engineering. Both of us (with immense bravado and naivete) applied for the tech team with minimal coding experience (at most, an introductory course to coding under NUS’s CS1010E). However, we were very eager to learn, and the tech team seemed very eager to share — which seemed like the beginning of a beautiful new partnership.

The first few days were painfully slow — we had to set up and get used to both the Ubuntu and python architecture necessary to get our codes up and running. At the same time, we had to tackle our tasks — Ming Foong was doing a web scraper, while I focused on an algorithm improvement. Thankfully, the former was solved by immense patience on the tech team’s side. We were guided through the architecture most of the time, with the help of Mufiz, Chinab and occasionally Andriano. As for the latter, both of us would do research after office hours to ‘catch up’, and frequently sharing with each other our findings to see if it would be of help.

Eventually, the two month stint produced strong results — both Ming Foong and my codes are still being used and updated in Jublia’s system.

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What to Expect

1) Trust — in a startup environment such as Jublia’s, everyone is busy hacking their way through countless problems of their own. As such, the team trusts your work and work ethic, which is hard to find in the corporate culture (with red tape all over the place). It is your duty to ensure this trust is not broken, and therefore you will need a sense of…

2) Ownership — your product is your brainchild, and therefore it is only right to take ownership of it. When your product is successful, people will thank you; when problems emerge, take ownership and do damage control/ remedy it ASAP. The Jublia tech team are a bunch of nice, goal oriented people and blame is definitely not the name of their game.

3) Passion — everyone here is very into the startup culture, which embodies more than just work. It is the desire to learn vigorously, hack away and have fun at the same time. The positive attitude that resonates within the office is certainly something that you can look forward to everyday!

4) Memorable moments — listening to Errol do a sales pitch, the quarterly Jublia department conference, Chinab’s housewarming (his mom cooks awesome food!!), Kuan Yan’s occasional words of wisdom, Andriano’s hair flopping down one day in the office :)

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