Coding for change

Ang Chin Chuen
Software Engineer,
GovTech

Coding for change

“My true passion is writing code.”

For Ang Chin Chuen, his love for coding was a belated discovery. While working as a business analyst, he was involved with Robotics Process Automation (RPA) and scripting various bots for different tasks. Over time, something changed.

“I found myself glued to the screen for hours working to overcome the challenges I’ve encountered. But rather than feeling frustrated, I was invigorated,” says Chin Chuen. “Whenever a script was finally completed, the deep sense of achievement and satisfaction I felt made one thing crystal clear to me: My true passion is in writing code.”

This realisation made him decide to take the plunge and script a new career path.

Chin Chuen says: “When the opportunity for a conversion course and career switch came, I grabbed it without hesitation.”

The 42-year-old signed up for a three-month software engineering conversion course that was both intensive and enriching. He particularly valued the “pair-programming” approach used during the course.

“One of the things I find fascinating is pair-programming as the opportunity to work with many like-minded engineers in an agile setting really entices me,” Chin Chuen says, adding that this is because two engineers working together can quickly unblock any mental impediments.

“We can optimise code to complete our coding tasks fast with fewer errors. We can complement each other as well as learn through our different styles of coding,” he says.

Making An Impact

Armed with his newly acquired skills, Chin Chuen has embarked on a new career at GovTech as a Software Engineer and is currently based at the Ministry of Manpower (MOM). There, he is tasked with a critical data migration project that would allow MOM to better use their data trove for innovation.

“I write code to migrate work pass-related legacy data. As the design between legacy and current databases is vastly different, my team coded new scripts that would handle the complex transformation requirements to successfully perform extraction, transformation and loading (ETL) to the current databases,” he explains.

It’s no easy feat. With millions of records to manage during the migration, there’s zero room for error. Yet, Chin Chuen is confident in handling the task and, script by script, he’s helping code a new chapter in MOM’s digital journey.

And he’s making a call for like-minded professionals to join him in the public sector.