Exploring the world...

Hong Kong sharpened the way I think about product usefulness in dense cities. Everyday life there moves quickly, and the best products feel deeply embedded into routine rather than layered on top of it. I found myself paying attention to how discovery, convenience, and trust were built into ordinary consumer decisions.

As a foodie, I kept returning to OpenRice to explore neighborhoods, cuisines, and restaurants I would never have found on my own. That experience made me think more seriously about discovery products, especially how software can influence where people go, what they try, and how smaller food businesses get surfaced.

Sydney made me think about product quality from a different angle. Instead of speed and density, what stood out to me was how much good technology disappears into the background. The best experiences felt calm, legible, and reliable, which is a useful reminder that product maturity is often reflected in clarity rather than spectacle.

Travelling there reinforced an important habit for me: whenever I use a product in a new city, I ask not just whether it works, but why it fits that environment so well. That kind of observation helps me think more clearly about what should and should not be translated back into Singapore.

Chongqing reminded me how dramatically local scale changes product expectations. In a city where movement, food, and commerce happen at an intense rhythm, technology becomes a layer of coordination as much as convenience. I kept thinking about how local platforms shape not just transactions, but how people discover and navigate entire urban ecosystems.

That was especially interesting from a builder perspective. It pushed me to think harder about aggregation products, recommendation systems, and what it means to help users discover high-quality options in environments where there is simply too much choice to navigate manually.

Japan made me pay attention to how physical and digital systems reinforce one another. From navigation and ticketing to retail and food ordering, the strongest experiences reduced uncertainty without demanding attention. Clear signs, predictable steps, and careful hand-offs made unfamiliar places easier to understand.

I also kept noticing that good systems were not always the most technologically ambitious ones. Sometimes a focused tool, a visible process, or a well-designed human interaction worked better than another app. That is a useful product lesson: technology should support the surrounding experience, not replace every part of it.

I went to Johor Bahru to watch France play Spain in the 2026 World Cup semi-final. Spain won 2–0. That is the clean version of the story.

The messier version is that I had turned the match into a small event in my head before it even started. It was a World Cup semi-final, it was France against Spain, and I was crossing the border to watch it, so the trip felt bigger than another fixture on a screen.

I wanted a France performance worth the effort and the tension that makes a knockout game feel dangerous right until the end. Instead, Spain scored twice, France never found a goal, and the match slowly became one of those nights where hope leaves before the final whistle does.

There is a particular kind of disappointment when the result does not feel like a robbery. Spain were simply better at controlling the game and turning their moments into a lead, which left me with nothing dramatic to blame except the scoreboard.

Supporting a team is a terrible little investment model. You put time, travel, sleep, and emotion into an outcome you have absolutely no control over, then try to calculate the effort backwards when it goes badly.

With a bit of distance, I do not think the trip was wasted. Football is partly the match and partly the ritual around it: choosing to go somewhere, building anticipation, sharing the tension, and remembering exactly where you were when the result landed.

I would obviously prefer the memory where France won, but this is the story I have now: I went to JB for a World Cup semi-final, trusted France to make it worth it, and watched Spain send them home. That is sport, unfortunately; the possibility of a special night is the same possibility that lets it become deeply annoying.