Hello there, Stranger.
This is my personal site. You Googled my email domain, didn't you. It's fine, everyone does. There's no real need for a website here, but here you go anyway. Have a read.
what I do
Where to start. I've worked on Internet things from plain old HTML to React. Watched WAP die and apps take over. Moved from bare metal servers to the cloud, and now whatever we're calling this AI moment. Long journey. Not over yet, I suppose.
Ad tech
In this field since DoubleClick was a thing. Well into the RTB era now, and still here.
Web-scale infra
I don't just work in ad tech, I've built it. Ad servers doing billions of requests a month. They mostly stayed up.
Keeping up
Confused by all the new tech coming out these days? I'm not. Keeping up is the job.
the day job
Advertising Operations at a newspaper in Hong Kong. Print, Digital, Social, Video, Branded Content; you buy it, I put it up. Some ad tech and AI stuff here and there too.
things I've made
Hong Kong Thru My Eyes
live · 5,175 photosI landed in Hong Kong in 2012 and started pointing my phone at things. Fourteen years later it's a proper archive: 109 neighbourhoods, organised by the places and themes I kept coming back to. Still going.
Pixels → RedLotus
the ad network yearsPixels was Hong Kong's leading multi-screen advertising company, later part of the RedLotus family. We built the ad tech and won some awards for it. A few of those are in random items.
Viu
the streaming yearsThe OTT streaming product. I handled the ad tech, plus a long tail of random items; tinkering with the CMS, the payment gateways, that kind of thing. Teams in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Middle East, South Africa, India, China, Hong Kong. That's a lot of time zones. I was on a lot of calls.
Garpu App
defunct, of courseMy old app. Helped you find good food and coffee in the Klang Valley. Garpu is Malay for fork, which felt clever at the time. The app is long gone. The name stuck around though; you're on garpu.net right now.
The KL years
freeformGosh, where do you start. KLue, Junk, Tongue in Chic, Urbanscapes, Markets, The Bee, Style Snaps, Gigorama. A list that's certainly not in order and with many omissions.
Currently tinkering
private, for nowA personal "digital twin": my events, health data, photos and people, all in one searchable database. And lately, a lot of AI. I poke at Claude and Codex most days. I run my own Hermes and OpenClaws. There are n8n and Zapier automations quietly doing things I've half forgotten about. Agents talking to agents. Some of it is actually useful. None of it public. Maybe someday.
random items
Stuff that accumulated along the way. Some of it is a decade old now. That's fine.
- The 'death of Flash' is a symptom of a larger disease
- A short piece I wrote for Campaign Asia about the industry's move from Flash to HTML5 for rendering creatives.
- AWS case study
- In 2015 we did a case study on our use of AWS to power our ad server. The infrastructure described has long been superseded; we moved on to serverless loads with event streams and ETL to data stores. Out of date, sure. Still a decent read.
awards
- Best in-app advertising, Bronze – Wyeth Illuma Chatbot
- Greater China Mobile Marketing Agency of the Year, Silver – Pixels Limited
- Best mobile advertising platform, Silver – Pixels Ad Marketplace
- Best use of technology, Silver – Carlsberg VR Fitting Room
- Excellence in use of technology, Silver – Levi's Cool Jeans
- Best mobile advertising solution, Gold – L'Occitane Mother's Day Selfie
talks
- Data center vs cloud computing
- Latest developments in digital advertising
- Interviewing for developer positions
- A day in the life of a web developer
elsewhere
Other places you can find me. Or don't. Up to you.