Eric Tan: My journey from hardship to being Lead Developer for TheLorry

In the beginning

It all started after high school when I had to choose whether to join the creative industry or the programming side. You might ask why I narrowed it down to these two groups since there are tons of subject to choose from.

It was simple, I love and am amazed by computer graphics created from animations, as well as the cool side of being a programmer. In the end, I chose Software Engineering with Games Design as it covered both of the subjects I was good at.

Throughout my university life, I was introduced to a lot of programming languages and became good at OpenGL C++ in computer graphics (University level) along with Actionscript 2.0 and 3.0 (If you still remember what this is). When I was going to graduate, HTML5 took over FLASH and Actionscript became less popular.

During my final year project, I faced an accident and required crutches to walk. I had a lot of personal issues and my emotions all went down the drain.

My first job was working in a jewelry shop as an in-training sales manager. This was because I realized that all of my university life was very technical and I still had to brush up on some soft skills. I ended up travelling to many places with the company for road shows and learned a variety of sales and customer relationship techniques.

Taste of hardship

After this, I switched jobs and joined a tech company that developed Joomla extensions. During that time, I was not even a web developer and didn’t have any real project experience. I knew that I was not valuable, which is why I offered to start working on a monthly salary of RM1.5k.

Food was expensive and so were the toll fares and petrol costs. I would eat one meal a day and bathed inside the building’s toilet using the hose provided in the restroom stall. This was because I would often stay overnight to make full use my time, learning everything I could and always doing my best to honor my project’s deadline.

After the company raised my salary, things soon began to get easier.

One year later, I took the risk of quitting my job and partnered with 3 other guys to start a small tech company that offered RFID solutions to an aviation engineering company. The company, who fixed and repaired aircrafts, were interested in buying our proposed system, and so we began building it.

As the job was project based, we were not paid monthly and I ended up coding from home to cut my expenditure to a minimum. Once we had completed the software, we implemented the demo and waited for the payment from the company.

However, the payment was delayed and it felt like I had gone back to the drawing board.

In order to survive I got a part-time job near my house so I could walk to work, and also began doing whatever freelance projects I could. In general, the clients were not willing to pay much as they felt that a website was easy to build and therefore, cheap.

As a result, I also used my part-time job to brush up on my customer relationship skills, trying to create an impression.

During my free time, I started my own project. This was a social platform similar to Foursquare that allowed users to share information and images regarding their geolocation. Other users would be able to see the information and could comment on it if they wished.

It was at this point that I began to learn more about startups and slowly begun venturing onto this path. The name for my project was Geolias, which was short for geography + alias. I started out alone and completed the social platform single handedly without using any framework (Vanilla).

One day I got an email to take part in an entrepreneurship program and got selected as one of the Top 100 Asia Finalist companies. 8 out of 100 companies were from Malaysia and I was one of those 8.

Despite things starting to look up, I soon got cheated out of a huge sum of money and my life plummeted once again. In addition to this, I was unable to find a partner for the project and ended up unable to afford the web hosting for Geolias. As a result, I had to discontinue the project.

Days and months passed. Although I was back to the drawing board, I did not forget my dreams and the passion within me. More importantly I did not regret what had happened. I had learned my lesson and was looking to improve, move forward and solve problems.

Opportunity knocks

One fine day, my close high school friend, who was the first designer for thelorry.com/my, called me up and offered me the project. I did not hesitate and accepted the offer because I had nothing much to do anyway. Initially, I started out creating the first B2B portal for TheLorry from home because there was no office yet.

I treated them as if they were my client as opposed to working like an employee, always trying my hardest to fulfill any requests from them and honoring the deadline as much as I could.

A few months later, TheLorry set up an office. I moved in and started working on the next project. The team began to expand and I found I was able to enjoy working with them, while putting some of my previous management skills to good use.

Since then, things have continued to escalate quickly and today is the day we say goodbye to our old office and are shifting to a new, bigger one.

In a nutshell, don’t be afraid to fall because it proves that you are still making a move and not remaining static. Remember to keep pursuing what you want and to work towards it, because opportunities come to those who are prepared.