About Derick Chen

Helping the galaxy to build modern software applications faster and better.

I started my career as a full Stack Software engineer in a major regional bank in Singapore. And as you may know, software development processes are far from seamless in a tech-fin organisation. When I moved to Meta (which was still called Facebook when I joined) as as an Enterprise Software Engineer, I was entirely amazed by the smoothness of the developer experience. Loading up a fully warmed up virtual machine on the latest stable release literally took 1 mouse click and 1 yubi-key press. The same frictionless building experience permeates to the other parts of SDLC. That was when I dedcided that I need to bring this to as many software engineers as possbile.

Next, I joined Amazon Web Services as a Software Architect. I helped AWS customers, from enterprises to start ups, United States to Malaysia, to discover how to improve their developer productivity and experience in order to create a frictionless experimental culture of innovation. The methodology me and my team have adopted was heavily based on the principles of working backwards from the business reality.

I am documenting the knowledge that I have gathered in my professional experiences both as a Software Engineer and a Solutions Architect. I hope these resources can help you in building software for our civilisation.