What I am in the middle of

I stepped down as president of SUTDCO this month. The term ran March to September, and the handover was the plan rather than a retreat — a student orchestra that cannot survive its own committee changing is not an orchestra, it is one person's hobby with extra chairs.

The thing I actually had to change

When I took the role I assumed the job was to learn everything myself. That is how I had operated until then, and it is a strategy with a hard ceiling. The thing that broke the habit was the double bass: I picked it up from nothing for the TENacity concert and was playing it on stage within a term, entirely because Liew Soon How had more patience with me than I had earned. You cannot shortcut that by reading. Somebody has to show you, repeatedly, while you are bad at it.

After that I stopped trying to hold the whole thing alone — leaned on the EXCO, asked seniors who had already run the budget, and stopped treating a request for help as an admission. Some of the term went well. Some performances needed more rehearsal than they got. But the part I would defend is that the organisation did not depend on me by the end, which is the only version of leaving that counts.

My mother started trading on the Indonesian exchange, and her record-keeping was notebooks — several of them, plus loose sheets. It worked, in the sense that she could find things. But watching her reconcile it made me wonder why the trading application itself did not answer the questions she was answering by hand: what a trade actually costs after every fee, what the exchange's price fractions will accept, where the auto-reject ceiling sits today.

The timing was luck. I was on the DAI MasterClass run by S. Anand, Head Innovator at Straive — How to Build AI Products, and Prove They Work — which gave me both the method and the tooling to get from "somebody should build this" to a working deployment.

What shipped

Fee-inclusive profit and loss, exchange price fractions, the ARA and ARB range, true break-even, and versioned CSV import and export so the record outlives the tool. The journal never leaves the browser. Access is gated and token-verified, and error logs are scrubbed so a stack trace cannot leak a ticker or a price.