linkedin.com/in/tzlee
· github.com/detach8
· tzlee@tzlee.com

Hello. I am Justin Lee.

Hello. I am Justin Lee.

I've always been driven by passion, and have been hands-on and involved in the Technology space since the early 2000s. Over the years, I have gained knowledge and experience in leadership roles and various Engineering disciplines such as Software Engineering, DevOps and Systems/Infrastructure Engineering.

I am continuously looking out for new technologies, trends and best practices. I seek to learn something new every single day, but most importantly, I love sharing what I have learned.

"In the course of my entire career, nothing is more fulfilling than mentoring and seeing people grow."

Engineering Manager, MyRepublic Limited

December 2021 — Present
www.myrepublic.net

At the heart of every Service Provider's business is the Business and Operations Support System (BSS/OSS). MyRepublic is the world's first telco to build its own proprietary Cloud-based BSS/OSS platform.

As an Engineering Manager, I was tasked to build new DevOps and SRE teams, and also grow an existing team of Software Engineers. This gave me great latitude to define what is needed to establish good working culture between the teams. As a result, I was able to build cross-functional teams of Engineers whom are not just only responsible for developing and deploying software to "the Cloud", but also participate in a hoslistic view of designing, maintaining, and monitoring the Cloud infrastructure on both AWS and GCP.

I am actively working on several initiatives including containerisation of legacy applicaitons, establishing automated testing, defining error handling/logging/monitoring best practices, GitOps/Infrastructure-as-a-Code (IaaC), and driving Agile Scrum adoption.

In order to drive many of these new initiatives, I spend my time writing clear documentation and guidelines, building example code libraries, performing code reviews, or by giving workshops/training on best practices, including topics such as Software Design/Architecture, Cloud/Infra Architecture, etc.

Technologies I work with include NodeJS, Java, .NET Core, Kubernetes (GKE), Selenium, PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, GitLab, Linux and many more.

Head of Engineering, BeamAndGo Pte Ltd

January 2020 — November 2021
www.beamandgo.co

As Head of Engineering, I led the Software Engineering team which I grew from a size of three to seven. I was also responsible for managing the entire Cloud infrastructure and establishing the DevOps processes. I've cultivated a healthy Engineering Culture by introducing many best practices including Agile Scrum, CI/CD, testing, peer reviews, and good documentation habits.

During my tenure, I re-architected the software to make it more maintainable; I led the team in decomposing a five-year-old system into a more modular, flexible and testable code base, and later implemented several of these modules as microservices using gRPC. These architectural changes have led to massive improvements to developer productivity and code quality.

Technologies I work with include Docker, .NET Core, gRPC, MySQL, Redis, Selenium, GitLab, Jenkins, AWS, Linux and many more.

Key Projects

  • Login 2.0 Screenshot

    Login 2.0

    An Authentication and Authorization service built entirely from scatch and based on open standards including OAuth 2.0 (RFC 6749) and JSON Web Tokens (RFC 7519).

    Because of the challenges related to our user demographics often forgetting complex passwords, Login 2.0 was designed to use passwordless (SMS OTP) authentication.

  • Photo of OFW by Grameen/Celo

    COVID-19 Relief Program

    In partnership with Grameen Foundation and Celo, we integrated Celo's cryptocurrency with real-time order processing of payments made in cUSD (Celo's stablecoin).

    In this project, we provided assistance to over 3,500 women in the Philippines during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

  • Seguida, ING and Unicef logo

    Project Seguida

    Project Seguida is an Open Source project sponsored under ING and Unicef Foundation's Fintech for Impact program.

    It is an extension to our existing membership system to define and create relationships between the migrant workers and their beneficiaries.

    Technical Director, Information Officer Pte Ltd

    September 2010 — December 2019
    www.informationofficer.com

    Information Officer started as a boutique hosting and CIO-as-a-Service consulting to USA-based clients. As a Technical Director, I set up and managed the business unit in Singapore which was started originally as a Support Center by adopting a follow-the-sun model to provide 24/7 support to USA-based clients.

    I later transformed Singapore to a profit center with 100~200% YoY revenue growth from 2015 till 2019 by developing new core competencies to provide Consulting, Training and Software Development services. We now have clients across various industries including Legal, Agriculture, Education, Government, Automotive, Medical and Telecommunications.

    I was also the primary driver of the adoption of many new technologies over the years, including Cloud providers — such as AWS and DigitalOcean, containerization of apps with Docker, CI/CD and automation tools such as Ansible, Puppet, and Jenkins. These new technologies have benefitted not only our internal operations as a hosting provider, but also our clients who depend on us for our Consulting and Training services.

    Highlights

    • Atlassian Event, 4 May 2018

      Atlassian Consulting

      Led implementations and migrations of large ITSM Service Desk systems across various industries with up to 10K users.

      Led implementations of Jira as a Agile/Scrum project management tool in organizations across various industries.

      Delivered public talk in 2018 during an Atlassian-hosted event in Singapore on Jira and Confluence migrations.

    • Stock image of Ethernet cables connected to a switch

      Infrastructure Engineering

      Redesigned US hosting datacenter and VMware infrastructure, including implementation of vDS with dedicated customer VLANs, 10GbE networking, iSCSI multi-pathing, hyper-converged storage, etc.

      Replaced proprietary hardware appliances such as load balancers and VPN with open-source or virtual alternatives; introduced automation and configuration management through the use of tools like Ansible and Puppet leading to improved efficiency, consistency, and long-term cost savings.

    • Atlassian Event, 4 May 2018

      Business & Operations

      Drove partnerships with AWS, Puppet Labs, Nutanix and several Atlassian ecosystem (“app”) vendors.

      Pioneered process to develop reusable recorded video training (~20% of services revenue) with professional voice-over using Google Cloud Speech API.

      Developed HR structure and processes, including employee growth plans, employee benefits, hiring practices, and flexi-work arrangements, which came into effective use during COVID-19.

      Founder, WhyMobile Pte Ltd

      July 2004 — Present
      www.whymobile.com

      WhyMobile is one of Singapore's top independent mobile phone/tablet/electronics retail store. The business was started to provide gimmick-free products and pricing with the aim to edge out dodgy retailers that were very prevalent in Singapore during the early 2000s.

      I take on the responsibilities of a CIO/CTO which is a largely passive role; I provide occasional support to the website and retail store when required.

      Personal Endeavours

      Various personal projects or initiatives where I have been a key contributor.

      • Photos of laptops being repaired and refurbished at the FSC

        Giving Back to Society

        2020 — Present

        Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, I have helped collect, refurbish and refresh used laptops for needy families. I am still actively seeking volunteers to contribute to this effort.

        These laptops have benefited single parents and their school-going children affected by the lockdowns, and also displaced professionals.

      • Carculator logo

        Carculator

        2015 — 2018

        An iOS App that helps calculate car purchase and ownership costs specific to tax structures in Singapore, such as depreciation, minimum PARF, etc.

        App Store

        (App is no longer listed as I have not renewed my Apple Developer membership.)

      • github.com/detach8/qemu-server-tools

        QEMU Server Tools

        2006

        Simple set of scripts to make the open source virtualisation hypervisor QEMU easier to use. It attempts to mimick VMware's Virtual Machine folder structure.

        GitHub Repository

        (Project was migrated to GitHub in 2020, original SourceForge repo here.)

      • Screenshot of a report from Squid-Graph

        Squid-Graph

        1999 — 2001

        A Squid v2 native log file analysis tool that generate graphs of a proxy server's traffic. Probably still in use today by some small ISPs.

        GitHub Repository

        (Project was migrated to GitHub in 2020, original SourceForge repo here.)

      • Design of Mazda MX-5 (Miata) Car Stopper

        Designs on Thingiverse

        2018 — Present

        Just a collection of some stuff I have designed and printed.

        Thingiverse Designs

        Further Experiences

        • Systems Engineer, Conversant Solutions Pte Ltd

          August 2008 — September 2010

          Conversant specializes in high-performance networking, caching and content delivery systems targeted at Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and large corporations.

          As a Systems Engineer, I was heavily involved in several key projects in the Telecommunications industry during the time, including Singapore’s first DDoS mitigation centre for a major ISP in Singapore. This was when the Monetary Authority of Singapore issued a Technology Risk Management Guideline requiring financial institutions to have DDoS mitigation capabilities.

          I was also involved in deploying and managing large clusters of web caches, load balancers, Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) appliances and data warehouses (for log storage) for several major ISPs in Singapore (>100 physical nodes, >40Gbps of traffic).

        • Senior Technologist, Duration Singapore Pte Ltd

          February 2007 — August 2008

          Duration is a software development house specializing in financial and real estate software for the US market before it expanded to Singapore.

          As a Senior Technologist, I led the discovery of emerging web technologies, defined standards for application development, and was responsible for training developers on these new technologies.

          I was also the key person who worked on various specialized/niche development projects ranging from web to desktop and mobile applications, including developing an Assisted-GPS (AGPS – using Wi-Fi triangulation) data collection tool for Microsoft Singapore, an experimental project which later became part of Microsoft Bing.

          Jargon Wall

          Linux Amazon Web Services C#/.NET Core CI/CD Git Ansible Jenkins Nginx Docker MySQL BIND Agile Redis Apache Web Server Apache Tomcat PostgreSQL Postfix macOS Splunk Puppet DNS PHP GitLab Graylog Squid gRPC Bash/Shell Python OAuth 2.0 Java HTTP HTML/CSS JavaScript Jira Confluence Citrix NetScaler SQL FTP VMware 3D Printing

          Built by hand with HTML/CSS, UIKit, Font Awesome, and Google Fonts.
          © 2021, Justin Lee. No computers were harmed in the making of this page.