Graduate Engineer is the sort of role where you get to go to a wide range of departments in the span of 2 years, to either get some hands-on experience or be part of improvement projects.

At one point, the heavy realisation of “this is not for me” hit. Many random ideas dropped in and out of all, the one that excited me the most was to find out how all these websites and apps were built - i.e. “Learn to code and build ideas out”. And there was the “switch”.

The idea of going abroad sounded afar, especially with no job experience as a developer. But there was also really nothing to lose and I went for it. I landed a role as Frontend Engineer at 株式会社 Cogent Labs (then Reactive Inc.). Luckily, conversational Japanese was adequate so I could focus a lot on improving technically, and absorb as much as I could like a sponge. Being an AI research company was the best platform to meet the smartest, the most creative people in the field. And for the living experience in Tokyo from flat hunting, to paying tax, visiting clinic, passing out on a train, I will get in to that later. It was fun.

Imagining there was a scale of ability from 1 to 5. Maybe my confidence level was barely on the edge of level 1, but there was a role that expected level 5. You don’t know what you don’t know. And based on the ground rule #1 - there’s nothing to lose. I took on a full-stack role in building a web-based compliance platform, giving rich insights into entities’ connections with the use of graph database🥳. D3.js + Neo4j, then later on scraping The art of data visualisation is not to feed all data at once, it means nothing to the users. Most users want insight directly. We took inspiration from Google Map (timeline)