Hello, I'm
Just another guy using tech to automate my day-to-day, so I can spend more time on what matters: good work, good food and good people.
or write to hello@ventustan.com
Every scholarship I applied for to Imperial College London turned me down. My parents generously covered my tuition, and I paid for almost all of my living costs myself by working as a Student Ambassador and private tutor. All while switching career paths, adapting to a whole new lifestyle and making friends from scratch in a foreign country. Somehow, I still graduated with First Class Honours.
Chilling at home after two years of corporate life, recharging and figuring out what's next.
Cloud & Platform Engineering in London, promoted to Senior Associate in 2025. Built a developer experience platform used by 2,000+ engineers, led the migration of event streaming to AWS MSK to help take the firm 100% cloud, and kept a C++ trading platform with 500+ daily users running smoothly.
First Class Honours. Teaching assistant for Computing & Numerical Methods, double bass in the IC Symphony Orchestra and IC Sinfonietta, and dabbled in gliding, fencing and Muay Thai.
Taught 20+ students throughout uni, from IGCSE up to A-Levels, helping students lift their grades from a C to an A*.
Built an Airflow reconciliation tool at Macquarie that saved 4 hours of manual work a day, and shipped features for GuruLab, a Forbes 30 Under 30 Asia EdTech startup. Before that, spring weeks at Macquarie, Palantir and Nomura.
Spread the word about Proprep, an EdTech platform, across top UK STEM universities, and helped RateMyPlacement's marketing team promote internships and graduate roles from partners like PwC.
Managed over RM20,000 (MYR) of society finances and still had a blast at Malaysian Night (MNight), performing in both the Lion Dance and the Dikir Barat on the same MNight stage, in front of 700 people.
Deputy National Executive Director (UK) · International Council of Malaysian ScholarsStarted as a Junior Associate, then led the 50-member UK chapter. Worked with directors across Singapore, Australia, Hong Kong, North America and Malaysia, ran events with partners like ICAEW, Maybank, Sunway Group and Axiata, and emceed the Malaysian Public Policy Competition 2021.
Founding team member of a pro-bono initiative that gave free tutoring to underserved students in Malaysia during the pandemic.
12As in SPM, then 4A* in A-Levels on a full-tuition scholarship. Led the double bass section of Taylor's Symphony Orchestra and picked up a couple of young inventor awards for an automated plant-watering system.
Been playing the double bass since 2016: orchestras and ensembles through school, the IC Symphony Orchestra and IC Sinfonietta at Imperial, and gigs and weddings on the side.
Nektar++ is an open-source framework for fluid dynamics simulations. I designed and built a central database for its simulation results, so 40+ research groups across 18 countries can securely share and reuse 50GB+ of datasets instead of re-running costly HPC simulations. I also wrote the core APIs, Python bindings for the C++ code, and Jupyter tutorials to get new users started.
nektar.info ↗More on the way: hackathon builds, fun side projects, and uni projects where I got to design actual aircraft ✈️
Programming languages matter less than ever. AI writes most of the boilerplate now, so I spend my time on the parts that still need a human: picking the right problem, designing the system, and wiring up agents to do the heavy lifting.
Python · Go · C++ · Java · Scala · TypeScript · Kubernetes · Kafka · Docker · AWS · Terraform · Grafana · React
The languages I still care about: English, Mandarin & Malay, plus enough Cantonese & Hokkien to get by. Currently trying to learn Japanese 🇯🇵