5 amazing developers from Singapore

Singapore, the city-state, has the reputation of being the home to one of the most conscientious people in the world. They’re hard workers – it is said that an average Singaporean works as much as 45 hours a week, which is longer than in most parts of the world. Surveys also suggest that 3 out of 4 Singaporeans take pride in the work that they do.

This 227 square kilometer island houses just over 5 million people, but has a 0.091 human development index – this is the 9th in the world. No wonder, the Singapore developer community boasts of some of the best programming talent in the world.

Here are 5 developers from Singapore that you must know a bit about!

Andrew “Bunnie” Huang

A simple Google search for the keyword Bunnie, will lead you to the Wikipedia page of Andrew Huang, who’s also affectionately known as Bunnie. This MIT grad, who has a PhD in electrical engineering has done and is doing some really cutting-edge stuff in computer programming.

From being the hardware lead for Chumby to designing the world’s first fully integrated photonic-silicon chips running at 10 Gbit/s with Luxtera, Inc. to building some of the first prototype hardware for silicon nanowire device research with Caltech, Bunnie has donned many hats. He has also participated in the design of wireless transceivers for use in 802.11b and Bluetooth networks with Mobilian, graphics chips at Silicon Graphics, digital cinema codecs at Qualcomm, and autonomous robotic submarines during the 1999 competition held by the AUVSI that the MIT team won. And that’s not even everything he’s done till date!

He’s now known for being one half of the brain behind Novena, an open-source computing platform. It is dubbed as the world’s first open source laptop.

Follow Bunnie here – https://twitter.com/bunniestudios

Arun Thampi

Arun is one of NUS’s many success stories. Before graduating, Arun had already interned with 2 of the forerunners in mobile technology – Motorola and Palm. After graduating, Arun took the startup route and became one of Wego’s first employees, which is now one of the largest travel companies in the world.

After Wego, Arun spent some time experimenting with other startup ideas, before Nitrous IO. The company, which offers a cloud development platform, has been functional for the last 2 years and has raised over 7 million dollars in funding.

When not at work, Arun is a traveller and an avid Manchester United fan, who one day wishes to catch a match at Old Trafford.

Follow Arun here – https://twitter.com/iamclovin

Erwan Mace

Calling Erwan a technology enthusiast will be far from doing justice to his 16-year -ong illustrious career. From holding senior technology positions in some of the world’s biggest companies like Alcatel, Akamai, Vivendi, and Google, to guiding successful startup exits, namely Spray (acquired by Lycos in 2000) and Soundbuzz (acquired by Motorola in 2008), Erwan has done it all.

He currently runs a Singapore-based mobile application development company which he started in 2009. The company is behind some really innovative apps, some of which have been downloaded over 10 million times, which you can check out here – http://www.bitsmedia.com/products

Follow Erwan here – https://twitter.com/erwanmace

Calvin Cheng

Calvin is the quintessential community hacker. When he’s not leading the technology team at the medical tech startup AlgoAccess, he is a part of many community-based projects like hackersandpainters.sg, golang.sg, python.sg, LittleMakers.ccand LittleHackers.com, and Tripconomics.com.

He’s quite well-known for lending a helping hand to startups. He is an expert in Python, Golang, Javascript, and Objective C. In his blog, he writes, “As a hacker, I have learnt a lot from my peers and stackoverflow and github are awesome resources that I use every day.”

Before his time as a programmer, this 38-year-old engineer used to be a Cascade Refrigeration Product Lead.

Follow Calvin here – https://twitter.com/calvinchengx

Loong Jin Chow

Loong Jin Chow is the youngest person on this list. He graduated in 2011, but has a body of work of someone who has been in the industry far longer. His contributions to the Linux ecosystem is right up there with any other top programmer in the field.

Loong currently works for Red Hat. He’s spent about 2 years at the company, but his work with Canonical goes back a long time. He’s been a Debian developer, an Ubuntu developer, and a package maintainer at Canonical. His contributions to the ecosystem have been recognized by NTU too, where he is the technical director at the NTU open source society.

He is also one of the Masters of the Universe (MOTU) at Ubuntu. ‘Nuff said.

Follow Loong here – https://twitter.com/hyperair

If you’re a developer in Singapore, then you must take part in this cool challenge – http://hck.re/tSKgt3