Thank You Grab
I am writing this on the last day of 2024. It is also the last day of my career at Grab. I have been in Grab for about 7 years. Thinking back, a lot has happened, and it has been quite a journey. It has been both humbling and rewarding.
Firstly, I want to say Thank You to Grab leaders, specifically Suthen, Mohan and Kenneth for their trust in me, and giving me the opportunities to do the interesting and challenging work during my time in Grab.
An overview on my journey in Grab:
- I joined Grab as part of an acqui-hire of my software consulting firm (Thank you Aaron for pushing the deal through!). We had 2 teams, one based in Beijing and another one based in Kuala Lumpur (KL). I moved from KL to Singapore, and stayed there for my first year in Grab.
- I was given the task to help build & launch the MVP for Grab for Business (GFB), which was triggered by Grab winning a tender to provide B2B transportation services for the Singapore Government. We also scaled GFB to support other companies around the region. I then moved to China, and was working remotely with the GFB engineering team (this is right before COVID happened).
- Building features for Grab-scale means that you need to be ready to deal with the failure of your original design. It helps to be able to iterate quickly. Grab for Business felt like a mini-startup within this larger Grab startup rocket-ship. I particularly liked the really close knit relationship that was formed between the product engineering teams and the business teams.
- I was running the team for about 3 years, when I started to get involved in Grab’s platform engineering efforts, which is what I was involved in for my last 4 years plus in Grab. I have always been involved in building products for non-technical users, and I was quite curious about being in a team building tools for software engineers.
- I really enjoyed the platform engineering work, where I was able to explore how important internal developer tooling teams (and platforms, yes PLATFORMS!) can really impact the productivity of software engineering teams. I was involved in various projects, such as: migration to Kubernetes for our backend microservices, adopted AWS Graviton (ARM-based CPUs) across our compute (and saved a ton of money 💰), improved testing tools with better mocking capabilities, improved our instrumentation of core mobile libraries, introduced AI-based tools such as Sourcegraph Cody and GitHub Copilot, helped push minimum Continuous Deployment (CD) mindset with DevOps Research and Assessment (DORA) metrics , just to name a few.
The time in Grab, really gave me the opportunity to learn what it means to be a good engineering manager. I have to say there is a lot of internal support such as training and coaching that happens, either through 1:1s, workshops and such. Before Grab, I only worked with small teams, and the scale at Grab really pushed me to learn on how to scale and manage multiple teams. Again, many thanks to Grab teams for making Grab such a welcoming place, so that we can do our best work! Despite the size of the company, I still do feel that within the more immediate teams, there is a close relationship between people, and I feel this is intentional and not something you get randomly, at least this is my personal point of view.
In the second half of 2024, I took a 6 month sabbatical. Unfortunately, I did not really meet some of my sabbatical OKRs: learning chinese has been slow, and I don’t feel I have explored the outdoors in Dali enough. That being said, I did manage to read more books, started cycling, and also learned how to make pizza and bake bread at home, which has been pretty enlightening, fun and challenging.
As for what I will be doing next: I will probably take a longer break to (ahem) meet my own personal OKRs, explore some pet projects of mine, and more specifically I would like to swing back to the side of an Individual Contributor (IC), by building some mini applications. I believe it is important to polish up my hands on technical skills. I really miss building things.
I leave you with this quote, that I originally learned from reading the Maybe You Should Talk To Someone book:
“Between stimulus and response there is space.
In that space is our power to choose our response.
In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”
- Author Undetermined
Happy New Year! And all the best in the year of 2025.
