Career

Actuarial

- University to my first year after graduation

Yes, I graduated with 1st class honour in HKU BSc(AC), but later I found that I am not so enthausastic on this sector… Oh yes, I did interest rate modeling (with those stochasic 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.

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!

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.