I joined JP Morgan as a technology analyst on August 2018, working under Corporate & Investment Banking. This is my first time working at a international corporation (discounting Compass...it's under Sage Group but remained as a standalone unit), so far the experience has been exciting and rewarding.

In the summer of 2017, I was a senior year student at HKUST, still qualify for a last bit of internship before jumping into the workforce. I was glad to be accepted into the Cyberport Digital Tech Internship Programme, which eventually led me to 3 months at Compass in San Francisco.

Two friends of mine has already been working at Compass, then-recently acquired by Sage. My duty was pretty much anything they threw at my way. Navigating the microservice-backed infrastructure was both fun and intellectually challenging.

Over the course of 3 months, I ended up performing marketing research, user interview, UI/UX design and development on a feature improvements serving thousands of merchants with $13B+ USD in gross merchandise volume.

I spent 6 years in the University, one-sixth of the time I was with EventXtra. My adventure at EventXtra has been amazing. It was fun working with colleagues full of characters and excellent at their own domains.

Perhaps what I learned the most aside from all technical stuff was how to be a decent person at work and in the sociality. The 26 lessons I learned at EventXtra has been posted on my blog. I am grateful for having worked at EventXtra as the experience in EventXtra hugely influenced my career choice and personal development.

I worked at EventXtra for 13 months in total, with 3 months of exchange at UC Davis, CA in between. Unlike some companies where interns do the most tedious tasks. I was tasked to fix bugs on the first week, and to build features since the second week.

Here is a list of features I proudly owned, meaning either I was the person developing it, or that I was the major contributor:

• Event registration renovation
• Multi-user permission system
• Two-step authentication, you can find out more on my blog
• Form builder for membership registration
• Payment integration

I also fixed multiple old bugs and increased test case coverage to 90%+. Other times, we were collaborating to fix bugs for new features and improve upon the existing features.

Other times, we had weekly technical team sharing featuring techs that we wish to adopt into the team, or just for pure fun. I even had the chance to built a Physical web prototype out of some spare hardware and presented it to the founder and the marketing team.

Tommy has strong technical skills. Although he was an intern in the company, he contributed quite a lot of ideas on team culture, products, and technical best practices. Quite an all-rounded technical person.

— Sum Wong, co-founder of EventXtra

When EventXtra was selected by the accelerator AppWorks, I travelled with another engineer and the co-founder to Taipen for a month. The experience spawned some productivity-related food for thought, which you may check out in this post.

As a startup with a rather small headcount (consistently less than 20 people) but hugely diversified backgounds, I developed close friendships with my teammates I found valuable in personal development. They showed me new perspectives of thinking and inspired me with demonstrated excellence in their respective fields.

I see my experience in EventXtra a major turning point in my university life. From an arrogant and naive person to someone trusted and befriend by many. The connections I developed has been useful in my career even today, and probably will continue to be well into the future.

In the winter of 2015, I simply found it too hard to stay at home for a whole month without do anything. A quick web search led me to Ikky, a Hong Kong-based startup. My relationship with Ikky extended beyond the initial 2-3 week of internship, to a part-time developer for 3 months afterwards.

Ikky was my first taste of startup in Hong Kong. Looking back, I am still shocked by how company culture could largely impact employee morale, productivity and turnover rate.

I worked at Ikky primarily to develop test cases for their RESTful API using Node.js. Impressed by the structured workflow and elegance of test driven development, I continued to employ TDD whenever the application means serious business. Advocating TDD has attracted me quite some attentions in my later employment as well.