Skip's Repository

I dabble in a lot of things, though my primary interests lie in mechanical design, data analytics, and general programming. Apart from making stuff, I picked up the electric bass a couple of years back and love making music with my band, and play videogames with friends in whatever time I have left (Factorio my beloved).

While I do my fair share of personal projects, I especially enjoy working with others who are just as passionate about their forté as I am about making things - the amoeba wheel saga is a great example. I don’t think that everything needs to be practical to exist; sometimes, we just want to bring something silly or cool to life.

I’ve realised that communicating the process and showcasing my work is just as important as having done it, whether that be for making small-talk or getting hired. I’ve also realised that that’s probably my weakest point, which is why I really do need some form of a repository where I can gather my thoughts. I did consider just chucking everything into Github, but making a custom website sounded more fun.

That said, I’m not a big fan of conceited design documents or self-praising (and likely AI-generated) LinkedIn posts, even if that’s how you ‘play the game’. I much prefer the informal, more genuine format of some blog posts, which is what I’m trying to keep alive with this website.

So yeah! Go check out the stuff I’ve worked on above, and always feel free to hit me up if you’d like to chat about it :)

I graduated with a diploma in Digital & Precision Engineering in Nanyang Polytechnic back in 2017, which gives me a good mechanical engineering background to fall back on.

However, I didn’t start really getting into making stuff until I started my Bachelor’s at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), when they gave us access to probably one of the most well-equipped fab labs out there (based on chats with students from other unis/colleges). While access to 3D printers were great, it was the laser-cutters that caught my interest the most.

To be honest, sometimes 3D printing something is just the better choice than designing and assembling a functionally similar part from laser-cut plywood. But there’s just something about the wooden aesthetic and fast iterations that make me keep coming back to using it (and possibly abusing it) as my primary fabrication tool of choice.

I’ve been told from a friend that my “style” of design involves a lot of laser-cut plywood, and I’ve since been trying to involve other forms of fabrication where appropriate. I’m still learning with each project, though!

I’ve been programming as long as I can remember - I was dabbling in making Flash games with actionscript in primary school, though I was never really good. My first “proper” introduction to programming languages was a singular C# class in Polytechnic, after which I branched out to Java, Python, and now, Rust.

I’m a big fan of learning by doing - I didn’t really have much web dev experience prior to making this website, and I just learned what I needed to to get the job done.

I don’t really like using AI assistance such as Copilot because I like coding. I enjoy thinking about why I’m structuring something a certain way, and I like the puzzle (usually) of figuring out why something goes wrong. I might not be the fastest programmer out there because of this, but I’d like to imagine that my style is less error-prone and more maintainable in the long run.

During an internship in Germany back in 2016, my manager heard that I had some programming knowledge and asked if I had any ideas to improve a manual workflow involving Excel and some proprietary software. I didn’t even know the field of Business Intelligence/Analytics existed before this, but as I helped automate increasingly more complicated tasks, I was building a solid foundation in drawing insights and visualisations by manipulating data.

This pattern continued when I started working full-time as a project coordinator. Even after I left to pursue my Bachelor’s, my ex-colleagues would still get in contact to ask questions on how to adapt my existing scripts to new systems.

A course in uni introduced me to using python libraries like pandas and numpy to manipulate data instead of Excel, and others taught me how to implement more complicated machine learning models. After noticing my affinity towards these kinds of analyses, I signed up to take the Analytics minor so I could learn as much I could about this field.