I'm a student from Singapore, currently studying at Catholic High School, where I take Triple Science and am part of the Humanities Talent Development Programme. Most of my time outside the classroom is spent building software, not because someone asked me to, but because I keep finding problems that I want to solve.

I don't remember a single moment where I decided I wanted to become a programmer. It happened gradually. One project led to another, curiosity became habit, and before long I was spending evenings building applications for myself, friends, school projects, and organisations. Some of them stayed small. Others grew into long term projects that I still work on today.

I started Origin Aria because I became increasingly interested in a simple question: does artificial intelligence have to work the way it does today? Modern language models are incredibly capable, but they are also built around prediction. I wanted to explore a different direction, one where an AI reasons over structured knowledge instead of predicting the next word.

Origin Aria has since grown into a long term research and engineering project focused on symbolic reasoning, knowledge graphs, deterministic algorithms, and explainable decision making. Whether or not every idea succeeds, building it has taught me more about software engineering than any textbook ever could.

Alongside Aria, I spend my time on several other projects. Assenture is where I explore larger software systems and product ideas. AvDev is my space for developer tools and engineering experiments. Through Spacexity I have contributed design and web engineering, and learned what it is like to build software as part of a team rather than entirely on my own.

I am rarely interested in adding another feature for the sake of it. I enjoy understanding how a system works beneath the surface, how its parts interact, where complexity comes from, and what could be redesigned to make it simpler, more reliable, or more useful.

That often means spending more time planning than coding, asking more questions than answering them, and rebuilding things when I realise there is a better foundation.

Being part of HTDP has encouraged me to think critically, communicate ideas clearly, and examine problems from different perspectives. Through Model United Nations, I learned that complex problems rarely have simple answers, and that understanding another person's reasoning is often more valuable than winning an argument. Serving as an EXCO member in my CCA taught me that leadership is less about having all the answers and more about helping a group move toward a shared goal.

I also play the piano and the flute. Music has taught me patience in a way programming never could. Progress is often invisible from one day to the next, but consistency compounds. The same idea applies to software: good systems are usually the result of hundreds of small improvements rather than one brilliant breakthrough.

I want to keep building things that solve real problems and deepen my understanding of how complex systems work. I am particularly interested in artificial intelligence, software engineering, operating systems, product design, and the intersection between them. There is still an enormous amount I do not know, and that is part of what makes the work exciting.