Eh, Singapore! You ever feel like tech moves faster than a Grab during peak hour? One minute we’re all about AI, the next it’s Web3. But what really matters for us here in the Lion City? Let’s talk about what’s *really* working and what’s just a waste of time and money.
Tech’s New Normal
Let’s face it, the Singapore tech scene is booming, with $12.5 billion in venture capital invested in 2022. But are we focusing on the right things? Here’s what’s trending:
- Cloud Adoption Soars
“Most projects (even inside of AWS!) don’t need to “scale” and are damaged by pretending so”
- Frontend’s Never-Ending Saga
“Frontend development is a nightmare world of Kafkaesque awfulness I no longer enjoy”
- The SQL Revival
“ORMs are the devil in all languages and all implementations. Just write the damn SQL”
The Tech Struggle is Real
But hold up. It’s not all sunshine and rainbows. We face some real challenges:
- Skills Gap Woes
“Most won’t care about the craft. Cherish the ones that do, meet the rest where they are”
- Legacy System Troubles
“We work in an old codebase – like, it’s now older than most of the new hires.”
- Overhyped Tech Traps
“Given a long enough time horizon, you’ll deeply regret building on Serverless Functions”
Smarter Tech Solutions
So, how do we navigate this tech landscape and build things that *actually* work in Singapore? Here’s the lowdown:
- Prioritize Practicality
“Just personal opinions, I guess, I agree with most, but here are some I disagree with: … There is no pride in managing or understanding complexity”
- Embrace Incremental Design
“I (16+ years developer) prefer to iteratively go between coding and designing. It happens way too often that when you’re coding, you stumble across something that makes you go “oh f me, that would NEVER work”, which forces you to approach a problem entirely differently.”
- Focus on the Fundamentals
“It’s very hard to beat decades of RDBMS research and improvements”
