The Archives - 2016
2016 (11 posts)
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Wobe’s founder on the basics for technical success Jakarta Panorama by Gunawan Kartapranata (CC BY-SA 3.0). If you’re a founder too, technical or not, you’ll know all about the struggle. The struggle: late nights, being poor, having everything go well and then not, the very same minute. For me as a…
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What's it like to be on the spectrum? It is to be able to do wonderfully complex and abstract things, at the speed of light, yet to be stumped at how to give straightforward directions to others. To be diagnosed after the age of 30 is to learn quite resolutely: the weirdest feature in my being is…
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If this looks bare to you, it's supposed to be. I've just finished archiving all of my old posts and giving them some new life as something else they're not: cool. By using Jekyll and Github Pages, this setup lets me edit the site in a way I must prefer now: with a text editor and git. Most things…
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Wonderful but sometimes a downer. Comfortable but invigorating. Stable but enervating. Fun but sometimes mild. Energetic and delicious. World-changing and domestic, depending on the day. Upwards trajectory but sometimes down. 31 is about being happy in my own skin: that it's really okay to have…
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I've started writing articles for Brink, a new media publication by the same people behind the Atlantic. My first piece is on Tech’s Role in Reaching Indonesia’s Rising Middle Class.
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Gay clubs were for flowers. Update: I wrote this piece before we learned more about what happened. I'm sorry about misgendering or mis-identifying the victims. I'm 31 in a few months. Not old, but old enough to remember how coming out was not on Tumblr, it was at Taboo. I would go with my best…
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12 years ago I came to Kolkata for the same time. At the time it was still mostly referred to as Calcutta. Kolkata, where every return feels both familiar and new. The city doesn't change; but you do. Every picture I have of it from 12 years ago still looks like it could have been from December,…
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Not for the first time, I found myself in a tiny room on a hot day, the youngest among old women. Each with a different thing to say to me, also the only person not from around these parts. You're so old now! And unmarried! Your hair is too white! Eat more soy beans! One woman rubbed my tattoos,…
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I'm seated now by the side of an old vending machine in Jakarta airport, with power sockets so dirty and old I had to think twice about plugging my cables in. Yet in all of Terminal 1, one of the oldest airport terminals in a country not known for modern aviation facilities, there was only this one…
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Fuck Medium. Seriously. I have had enough of their terrible user interface, narrow writing experience, and the empty platitudes of ‘recs' and comments from people looking to improve their lives by reading inspiring content from people they don't care about. Worst of all? I hate people whining about…
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When I came home (to Singapore) a couple of days ago, I instructed the taxi driver to go to the Caltex station at East Coast. Most cabbies know this place, but he didn't. He's 74 years old, so he only knew this spot as "Tan Boon Chye & Co" (brain GPS never update firmware). Tan Boon…