Career

Actuarial

- University to my first year after graduation

Luckily, I graduated with 1st class honour in HKU BSc(AC), but later I found that I am not so enthusiastic on this sector… Oh yes, I did interest rate modeling (with those stochastic calculus stuff) for my final year project. So you could assume that I know finance, a little bit of economics, actuarial and a little bit CS.

By the way I love Maths, but I love statistics more. That’s why I chose to take a final year project (while it was not required by my programme) to see if a research career fits me or not. Well, I once approached a few staff in HKU but none of them accepted me, the reason mainly being the fact that the BSc(AC) degree doesn’t allow you to take too much non-core electives, that it made my course history too actuarial - “Hey you don’t look like you are interested in statistics / data science!”. Well, after two years I could prove that they were wrong.

Data Scientist

- A whole new world

Somehow I was forced to learn how to write a website (properly) - last time I wrote kind of website was about the year of 2005 - at that time when using frame was still mainstream and you could put marquee on your webpage… At that time me and my teammates got no experience on everything, so we even used jQuery to do most of the frontend interactions…

The website (that I am asked to help maintaining) is an aggregrator of some data, so I got forced to learn data scraping from zero. Mainly I used Python (3.5 -> 3.8 btw), with the help of things like selenium and bs4 and ChromeDriver, yeah they are really useful.

Oh yes, another skillset I got is to draw charts with d3.js, crossfilter and dc.js. While using a lot of third-party libraries would be nice enough (in 2019), at that time these packages were already the best one(s) to start with to draw some decent charts.

And then on aching learning. My bosses asked me and a few team members to participated in Numer.ai. Basically it is a weekly machine learning competition. You download the dataset every week, run you model and wait for a week, and then you get your reward, in Bitcoin. And yeah, after a while my boss halted the project (for no reason, yeah we are a startup). But I continued to play in the weekly tournaments and finally I got a great deal of Bitcoins for my Japan trips. A nice experience was that I wrote my own scraper to fetch jockey data from hkjc, and built some simple rule-based model. It went… quite well, I could gain $8 for every $80 bet on the races so, I stopped this personal project.

Cloud Engineer

- Now, and hopefully the future

Basically I do both DevOps, security, cloud, frontend, backend… basically everything related to web…

And I am a holder of four AWS certificates:

  • Developer (Associate) - April 2018
  • SysOps (Associate) - April 2018
  • DevOps Engineer (Professional) - Feb 2019
  • Security (Specialty) - May 2019

I used LinuxAcademy (founded by Anthony James) throughout my whole journey (with on-job auto training).

For my detailed job experience, please go to my LinkedIn. I don’t like to mix my personal stuff with companies’ stuff.

AI & InfoSec

- 2024 onwards

From 2024 onwards, I shifted my focus more towards AI (Artificial Intelligence) and InfoSec. I built popular open-source projects like bedrock-access-gateway-function-url - an OpenAI-compatible gateway for Amazon Bedrock. Currently, I’m dual-tracking on AI and Information Security, working on AI agents for enterprise use cases while implementing AI governance frameworks.

I also focus on Business Operations and Automations - an area which traditional software engineering teams don’t typically help with in a company. Think Google Apps Script vibe coding, but for solving real operational problems that fall through the cracks.

DevSecOps, Security, InfoSec, Cybersecurity

As I proceed my career in the company that I work for, I found that I am more interested in security. Not only during CI/CD or in the Cloud, but anything as a whole for the traditional IT side - you can’t go far if you say you are a security expert but you don’t know how to secure your own laptop or your organization’s data and network.

AWS Community Builder

I was lucky to have shared a few talks in AWS events presenting the company I am working for, and later in 2022 I was invited and admited as an AWS Community Builder. Now I am contributing to the AWS community in Hong Kong, as well as occasionally writing blogs on https://dev.to.

Personal

I know Japanese though I only took JLPT N4… After that I studied in Sophia University (Tokyo) for two months for Japanese Language & Culture courses. And then, I travelled around Japan’s coasts for 5 weeks, with a pair of 21 days + 14 days JR Passes. Do approach me if you got your crazy plan on travelling in Japan with JR, I might help you!

Seichimeguri (聖地巡礼)

I have a habit of visiting real-world locations that appear in anime — what Japanese fans call seichimeguri (聖地巡礼). This has taken me to Fukui (Glasslip, 2014), Numazu (Love Live Sunshine), Uji (Hibike! Euphonium), Takayama (Hyouka), London (K-on! Movie), and Italy (Love Live Sunshine!! Over the Rainbow).

Aqours (2016–2020)

From 2016 to 2020, most of my non-work passion went into Aqours — the second-generation group from Love Live! Sunshine!!. I attended every major live concert, made multiple pilgrimages to their fictional hometown in Numazu, Shizuoka, and even flew to New York for an event. The chapter ended in February 2020 — CYaRon!’s first live in Fukuoka was my last in-person concert before COVID.

The two quotes I live by both trace back to this era: 日々精進 (daily improvement) from voice actress Inami Anju, and 一期一会 (once-in-a-lifetime encounter) from Aida Rikako. They stuck.

How I got here

My security-first mindset traces back to 18 years as an altar server — liturgical precision means every step matters. My builder instinct comes from LEGO and origami since childhood. My actuarial training gave me the math. Somehow all of this converged into a DevSecOps engineer at an insurtech company.

Favourite Quotes

  • 日々精進
  • 一期一会
  • Get the shit done. If you got OCD and want to do things better, do it on your own but please do not make others suffer with you just because of your OCD.