JuniorDevSG - Code & Tell August 2025

Event Date: Thursday, 14 August 2025
Venue: Thoughtworks Singapore
18 Cross St, #12-01, 18 CROSS, Singapore 048423

NO FOOD PROVIDED FOR THIS MEETUP

Venue Sponsor: Thoughtworks Singapore
---------------------------------
Presentations

Topic: How to use AI as a coding mentor to self-learn and level up

Speaker:
Tai Shi Ling, CEO, UI-licious
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shi-ling-tai-16679147/

Description
The goal of the talk to show how to use different AI coding tools, to improve their code, learn unfamiliar codebases, and research new domains / tools.

- I’ll do a walkthrough of a codebase that needs improvements and refactor it using agentic AI (~30 min)
- How to use github co-pilot’s ‘explain’ mode to learn about unfamiliar codebases and troubleshoot issues (~5 min)
- How to research new domains / tools (~5 min)

About Shiling
Tai Shi Ling is the CEO and co-founder of UI-licious, a low-code tool for UI test automation. She's been coding since 2008, and has seen how coding has changed dramatically over the years. At UI-licious, she's very involved in product design and development, and leads the engineering team. And when she's free, she does a bunch of them to help the Singapore developer community grow - like hosting KopiJS, and building devsgowhere.com

------------------------------------

Topic: Git gud at opening PRs and doing code reviews

Speaker:
Lau Kar Rui, Lead Software Engineer, Open Government Products
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/karrui/

When I first starting out working with other SWEs in a team, I often found that I had bad habits that caused my pull requests to take longer than it should have to be merged and deployed. I wondered how to how to write proper pull requests; so that it gets deployed faster, and also "get good" at reviewing pull requests, so others get their code in faster.

Spoiler alert; it's less about writing good code and more about cultivating good personal habits.

Over the years, I've accumulated some tips and tricks so that I can do the above. I hope to share it with others starting out as software engineer (in a team) so as to short circuit their path to success.

About Kar Rui
I am currently a Lead Software Engineer in OGP, in the Tooling team. Main role is to improving developer experiences by creating internal tools and libraries such as OGP's Design System, and propagating baseline engineering expectations (around testing, application best practices, etc). I have worked on many products you might have used before -- the more notable ones including FormSG, the ActiveSG rebuild, and the COVID vaccination appointment system.

------------------------------------
Schedule:
7:00 to 7:15 - Event Registration & Networking
7:15 to 7:20 - Introductory Remarks
7:30 to 8:00 - Topic 1
8:00 to 8:30 - Topic 2
9:00 - Supper

About JuniorDev SG:
JuniorDevSG is a developer interest group that focuses on providing a place for junior developers to learn and network with each other.
At the same time, we seek to be a support system to help junior developers break into tech, navigate their careers as well growing them to one day become senior developers or tech leaders in the tech industry.