My Learnings

This page records everything I’ve studied, learned or practiced.

The points with (*) are my favorites.

2025#

I quit my job at Seek and started working at iPiD, a local fintech startup.

  • Learning about encryption, pgp, mtls, rsa, csr, symmetric and asymmetric encryption
  • Learned Restate.dev and wrote an internal RFC to adopt the tech
  • Writing a loosely-coupled Go monolith app for a personal side project

2024#

  • *Obsessed with Actor model in Go, particularly Goakt and its CQRS meta-library eGo.
  • *Learned InertiaJS with Go. Built PingCRM using Vue, Goinertia, sqlboiler and std net/http server.
  • Read The Art of Talking to Anyone by Rosalie Maggio because I feel like my people skill is limiting my impact in my career.
  • Learned about RocksDB
  • Joined Thoughtworks Engineering Leadership workshop - learned about change management, stakeholder management, how to lead a project to success and building high performing team
  • Write Golang in prod again

2023#

  • Read ‘The Staff Engineer's Path’ by Tanya Reilly
  • Read ‘Designing Data Intensive Application’
  • Read ‘Software Engineering - The Soft Parts’ by Addy Osmani
  • Learned Node stream & Highland JS to build efficient data processing pipeline on a huge dataset
  • Used Clinic JS to debug memory issue in NodeJS
  • Learned Actor Model
  • Learned HTMX
  • Learned Ansible

2022#

I quit my job at Billplz after working for 8 months. I started a new career at SEEK Asia as a Senior Software Engineer.

  • Learned Remix and NestJS framework
  • *Learned Deno runtime & Fresh framework
  • Used Terraform & Cloudformation to manage AWS resources
  • Used k6 to perform load test
  • Used Datadog & OTEL for monitoring & observability
  • Used Playwright and Cypress for testing
  • Used monorepo in JS
  • Read ‘Software Engineering at Google’ book

2021#

I quit my job at Onapp KL after ~4 years working. I started a new career at Billplz as a Software Engineer L3.

  • *Learned Clickhouse DB and amazed by how great and unique this OLAP database is. I operate the database with tens of millions of rows
  • Learned B-tree and B+ tree data structure, database indexing, optimization, transaction and isolation levels. Earned Percona Database Indexing Course certification.
  • Learned Ruby on Rails (again after 10 years) and its design patterns (Presenter, Service, Concern, Background Jobs) for my new day job
  • Learned Typescript, NextJS, React for new day job and Asthma Journey SaaS. React Hooks is really challenging and I’m still working on it.
  • *Built a POC API server for JKJAV website using Redis and Go Fiber, utilizing Go Waitgroups, goroutine, Redis connection pooling, denormalization and transaction.
  • Set up Meilisearch to enable searching on our Firestore database. Took a few hours to set up the Meilisearch instance and sync the data from Firestore to Meilisearch.
  • *Shipped my first Golang code to production, integration of an API server with a Malaysia payment gateway (iPay88). The API server is consumed by a mobile app.
  • Taught myself beginner-level Elixir Phoenix framework. Published a simple benchmark here. Tried to build several web apps and API servers using Phoenix but still not feeling productive with it yet.
  • Used Django REST Framework, Nuxt and TailwindCSS to build Tax App
  • Studied UI/UX by reading and watching Refactoring UI by Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger
  • Taught myself OWASP security vulnerabilities (CSRF, XSS, SQL Injection) and mitigations (CSRF Token, SameSite cookies, CSP)
  • Other techs I taught myself: *Redis, Supabase, Chakra UI, Tailwind

2020#

  • *Taught myself intermediate-level Django & Django REST Framework. Loving this framework.
  • *Taught myself beginner-level Nuxt & Vue
    • Built many JAMstack web apps together with Django REST Framework
  • Taught myself PostgreSQL and CockroachDB. Learned a bit of DB knowledges like compaction, Write Ahead Logs (WAL), RocksDB storage engine, indexing, materialized views, etc.
  • Taught myself AWS products eg. DynamoDB, S3, Lambda, APIGW, CDK, RDS, etc. Built Voting Serverless App using these techs. Learned DynamoDB single-table pattern and aggregation with DDB stream.
  • Taught myself GraphQL client. Built a simple chat app that utilizes GraphQL query, mutations and subscriptions. It’s built using Hasura and Nuxt.
  • Taught myself GCP products eg. GCS, BigQuery, Data Studio, GCR, Cloud Build, etc. for my day job
  • Studied programming theories like Domain Driven Development, Dependency Injection, Event Sourcing, CQRS, Saga pattern, Design Patterns, choreography & orchestration, Microservice architecture, Port & Adapter pattern, Clean architecture pattern, etc.
  • Other techs I taught myself: Firebase Auth, Stripe integration (Billing & Payments), Hasura, Hashicorp Nomad

2019#

  • *Taught myself intermediate-level Kubernetes
    • Wrote a Proof of Concept Kubernetes CSI-compatible storage controller based on Rancher Local Path Provisioner.
    • Plan, set up & manage multiple on-prem edge clusters
  • Taught myself basic AWS & GCP cloud. Taking A Cloud Guru courses
  • Taught myself basic Go. Built non-production web apps using Echo & Gin web framework

2018#

I started working as a full-time SWE at Onapp KL

  • *Taught myself basics of message brokering & how asynchronous, microservice system works. It radically changed my views on how scalable systems are built.
  • Learned about Python concurrency, multithreading and multiprocessing. Encountered a problem with Global Interpreter Lock (GIL) and solved it by not sharing database connection between threads
  • Taught myself DevOps tools like Puppet, Grafana, Netdata, etc.
  • Other techs I taught myself: InfluxDB, Nginx Lua, MongoDB, etc.

2017#

This is during my university internship year

  • *Taught myself Python. Wrote my first unit tests. Fell in love with Python ever since.
  • Taught myself Docker. My personal development process has changed ever since.
  • Other techs I taught myself: Java Spring & Hibernate, Behavioral Testing with Ruby Cucumber, CI/CD with Jenkins, Elastic stack

2016#

  • Studied basic Java, PHP & MySQL in my university years.
  • Developed a document management system with a team of 5 students using IBM Cloud, Cloudant & Cloud Foundry for our university dissertation project.

2011#

  • Taught myself Ruby on Rails, Sinatra & jQuery. Built a simple blog and aiming to build a Youtube clone. Too ambitious for 16 years old kid.
  • Deployed my first Heroku deployment
  • Taught myself MySQL

© Fadhil Yaacob 2025

My Learnings