Introduction

About Me

  • My name is Thomas and I have 20+ years of professional experience in the software industry - not including my teenage years where I started with BASIC programming on an Apple ][ back in the mid 1980s.

  • I then went on to learn Turbo Pascal, including Object Oriented Programming, Borland C++, Visual C++ and Java.

  • I’ve been a software solution architect from 2009 to 2021, working mostly on Java and J2EE based solutions.

  • From 2021 September, I’ve working as an Application Manager in the banking domain, making use of my technical and project management skills.

My Passion

  • Being a software solution architect is what I love to do.

  • I absolutely love programming, but I also know that with my seniority, those skills would be better used to guide teams under me to design and implement software solutions.

  • The exciting advances in cloud computing and software technologies in the last decade have changed the way software is designed. I enjoy keeping abreast of these technologies that bring meaningful business benefits to IT customers.

  • In my quest for a deeper grounding of cloud-native technologies, I have touched on Angular, Enterpirse Integration, NoSQL databases and Java. I have deployed this website on my self installed Kubernetes cluster from my home server.

  • I also lean towards using open-source based products because I know there are no commercial influences surrounding technical decision making.

My Skills

I have worked with a number of notable Multinational Corporations (MNC) through my career on software projects in the Asia Pacific region and a Python based project in the United States.

Some of the skills I posses are:

  • Architecting end-to-end software solutions and designing applications with a deep understanding of People, Process and Technology.

  • End-to-End architecture using microservices for a cloud platform or self hosted / on-premise solution.

  • Hands-on experience: Linux (since 1996), Java Spring Boot 5, Kubernetes, AWS, Azure, IT Security, pfSense firewall, Android Development, Python, C++, Git, VMWare ESXi, Raspberry Pis and a whole lot more.

My Background

  • I am born in Singapore and have spent most of my life here. I can speak Mandarin (Chinese - studied 12 years as my 2nd language in school) and Malayalam (Indian Mother Tongue).

  • Education: Graduated from the University of Wollongong, Australia with a Bachelors in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering.

This website

The reason I put up this website is to:

  • Introduce myself

  • Give potential employers an idea of the skills that I posses.

  • A collection of my technical notes which I and anyone else can refer to. This comes from my belief that technical documentation is important.

  • Make use of Sphinx and VIM as documentation tools, both of which I believe make documentation so much easier and gives more structure than being confined to a proprietary single page Microsoft Word document. Oh yeah… I really picked up VI / VIM in April 2020 and absolutely love using it on NeoVIM on Windows and Linux.

  • Challenge myself to a home hosted site. This website is deployed from my home ESXi server using an NGINX https endpoint on a reverse proxy. This is redirected to an NGINX imaged Kubernetes pod deployed to my home Kubernetes cluster. My home network is secured with a pfSense enterprise level firewall that excludes access from certain countries.

Contact me

Feel free to get in touch with me at bigtompk-gen @ yahoo.com (without the spaces) if you have similar interests or would like to know more about me.