2025 Year in Review

2025 was a year of teaching, building, and exploring new frontiers. Here's a look back at how it unfolded.

The year started with reflection and education. In Q1, I spent time at Tampines Secondary School introducing students to AI, while also diving into Unity development to build a game for a good cause. Back at university, I became a teaching assistant for Enterprise Solutions Development (ESD) and Digital Business Technology & Transformations (DBTT) — a super fulfilling experience sharing my knowledge with others. I also took on my first Negotiations and Leadership module.

Community involvement ramped up as I became a Perplexity.ai ambassador, leading our school to over 700+ signups. I also guided students through their first AWS certification in the .hack programme and had the privilege of moderating an AI talk with C-suites at SMU ODYSSEY.

Q2 saw me sharing more about MCPs with the public at gen-c.info, venturing to Japan for a trip (and clubbing alone!), and continuing mentorship for juniors in the tech scene. The highlight was joining the Community Hackathon 2025, where we built and shipped letterkey.sg.

Things accelerated in Q3. We won the hackathon and went straight into an accelerator programme, launching pilots every weekend. Amidst the grind, I caught Fred Again live, volunteered at AWS Community Day 2025, and finally got my hands on Cursor stickers at their first Singapore meetup. The building didn't stop—I built debate.bchewy.com for the GPT-5 Emergency Hackathon and even got featured on The Straits Times for Letterkey.

I also joined KPMG as an intern, visited Figma's Singapore office, and built poolabs.dev (AI insights for... well, poo) at SUTD's What The Hack hackathon. Fitness took a hit though—my Anytime Fitness membership saw less use than intended :(

Closing out the year in Q4, I taught students about vibe-coding and building fast with AI from SMU Business Intelligence & Analytics Club (BIA)'s AI Lodge, sharing our shipping velocity from Letterkey at beacon.better.sg. The hackathon streak continued: I won 2nd place at the Cursor Singapore Hackathon with canyoubeatgroq.com and shipped a Cloudflare-only debate platform at the AI Tinkerer's Cloudflare x Redis Hackathon.

I finished my second-last semester building cool LLM projects under a god-tier mentor, wrapped up my KPMG internship, and capped it all off with an internship in Bangalore, India—an incredible opportunity to experience a new culture and tech scene.