Overwhelmed - Decisions, Decisions, Decisions

Realized that I haven’t been blogging much about myself for awhile now. The main culprit would be microblog (twitter). Ever since I started microblogging, I have been putting my thoughts on things at the moment directly to my Twitter and would not have kept it to blog when I have the time.

Another reason for my lack of blogging would also due to my work. Yes, I am busy, so are a lot of us. But more than busy, I am getting rather overwhelmed with my work and to-be-made decisions. If you have been emailing me about freelance work, you would know that I have stopped accepting freelance projects for a few months now at least for the time being as I am currently involved in a few long-term projects and also managing my startups.

Everyday, there are more tasks that I insert, or pull from yesterday’s, onto my to-do list than I can complete them. There are just too much work for me to handle everyday, and that’s also after I have totally taken out hobby (poker) from my routine. I have stopped playing poker for more than a month now, online or otherwise.

Besides tasks and work, recently I have also been thinking a lot about decisions that I have to make for my startups. Should I take on this expansion path, should the business be taking on this marketing plan, should I consider taking in investments, should I spend my limited coding time to implement this. There are simply too many decisions to be made recently and with my easily-worried attitude, I get overwhelmed sometimes trying to organize my thoughts.

Recently, more often than not, I find myself starting on a task, working on it, only to be switched over to another task about 3 minutes into the earlier one. The same would happen on the 2nd task as well, and so on.

Maybe I am involved in too many things now, maybe I am not. I know a lot of people are involved in more things than I am and yet they can still remain pretty organized.

Anyway, I will be taking a month of non-pay leave from one of my jobs to catch up on things, especially for those on my businesses. Most importantly, in that one month, with one-less commitment, I hope I am also able to think more clearly and make good crucial decisions and plans.

I have been really lucky to have really understanding bosses. They have not only been extremely understanding of my situation and my involvement in my startups, they have also been lending helping hands as much as they could to aid me. I would also like to thank them for being so nice and understanding.

BusinessWeek Asia’s Top 25 Young Entrepreneurs

I couldn’t believe myself when I first learned about the news that I was chosen by BusinessWeek as one of the Asia’s Top 25 Young Entrepreneurs.

Until today, I’ve never consider myself as a successful entrepreneur. Even though I’ve started quite a few sites and services that have gained me some recognition, I’m mainly doing them for my love for technology and the love of making things. I enjoy the challenges of making technology useful for people. Until now, I’m still starting up new businesses (the latest one being Widgeo.us) with the core value of making technology the way people (or most people) would want it.

The company that’s being featured on Businessweek - Ping.sg runs almost entirely on the basis that the site is built for the community, thus the community would decide on how they want it to be. I love to see that things I can build are being used by a lot of people, and that people are loving it. That, to me, is more valuable than any amount of revenue that I can generate. Maybe my last statement is against the name of being an entrepreneur, personally I’m always considering myself an enthusiastic technologist than an entrepreneur. This is also the reason why I am directly involved in technological development for all of my sites/companies so far.

I am flattered by being recognized by one of the top business magazines in the world as one of the Asia’s top 25 young entrepreneurs. I am not who I am today alone, thanks to everyone who have supported me all along.

Congratulations to all my friends who have made it to the list too. Surprisingly, I personally know at least 4 other top Asia’s young entrepreneurs.

And, I would really appreciate if you could vote for me.

For now, I will continue to build more and better things. Anyway, it’s not so much the desire to do business but the love of technology is what getting me into all of these.

Security in PHP

Last night’s talk was great. Not only that the talk was well-received, I did learn some tricks from the audience as well. That’s where I really love technical discussions, we all learn from one another.

Here are the slides that I’ve promised. It’s done with Google Docs. If you want to know, the slides builder is great, but if you’re using it from Singapore, the lag is sometimes a little too much and occasionally (I should say more than occasionally) you will get kicked out of the app for saving failure.

Launch Slides

Thanks to all of you who attended the talk, especially those who were asking and sharing things during my session. Thanks to Michael for putting in so much effort to organize the PHP event. If you are a PHP programmer and are based in Singapore, do sign up for Singapore PHP User Group.

Feel free to leave some tips/comments/feedback in the comments for this post. :)

Updated at November 20, 2007:

Thanks to Singapore PHP User Group for the video.

PHP Singapore User Group November 2007 Event

Thanks to Michael Cheng for starting the PHP Singapore User Group and putting in so much effort in organizing this November meet up.

There’ll be 3 talks during the event and I’ll be speaking for one of them, on Security in PHP.

I’ll be sharing some security measures that web developers should be looking out for when writing applications. If you have some input on this topic that you think I should share, please drop me a mail at chua@uzyn.com, or you can also attend the event and raise it up as well. I will appreciate your input. We should all share and learn from each other.

Please RSVP for the event.

See ya’ll this coming Wednesday.