hello, i'm ray 👋🏻
i build pixel-perfect UIs at paynet

I’m Ray, a frontend engineer at PayNet who cares way too much about the little things. I’ve been building stuff for the web since I was 10, and I still haven’t gotten over how fun it is.

On the rare occasions that I decide to touch grass, you’ll probably find me chasing good light with a camera, digging through record bins, or on a never-ending hunt for the perfect cup of matcha (still looking, recommendations welcome).

Welcome to a tiny corner of the internet I somehow ended up owning!

My love for programming didn’t start in a classroom or a textbook. It began with my 10-year-old self tinkering with PHP and XAMPP while accompanied by a random Indian guy on YouTube teaching me how to spin up a private Habbo server.

It was messy as hell and I didn’t know what the hell was I doing. But seeing something I made coming to life and actually worked for the first time felt like magic. That was enough to spark something that never really went away.

Since then, coding stopped being just about getting things to work and became about getting things right. I’m far from being a prodigy and I’m definitely not fast. I just have a stubborn need to care. I’ll happily spend an unreasonable amount of time polishing something most people would call “good enough.”

I’ve got big plans for myself, and I’m probably still at the beginning of them. There are too many things I want to build, too many skills I want to earn the slow way, and too many ideas sitting half-formed in my head.

This site is where some of those thoughts land: A mix of experiments, reflections, side projects, and the occasional ramble when I’m thinking out loud.

None of this is finished. I’m not either. But if you’re here, thanks for stopping by!

So you picked the long version. Bold choice, but I respect it.

How It Started

My first ever “project” was a private Habbo server I set up when I was 10, armed with nothing but XAMPP, a bunch of PHP I didn’t understand and a random Indian guy on YouTube walking me through it step by step. It barely worked. But it worked, and that was enough to get me hooked.

Fast forward a decade or so, I ended up studying Software Engineering at Universiti Malaya. Funnily enough, uni-me wasn’t nearly as confident as you’d expect. I was already a programming tutor back in my PASUM foundation days, yet hackathons still felt way too intimidating and out of my league to even sign up for one.

Around the same time, I also started posting on LinkedIn, mostly because sophomore me was desperate for any scrap of attention that might help me land an internship. (It worked, eventually.)

That all changed a year before I graduated, when my friend Faidz and I joined Dell’s Hack2Hire as a team of just two (incredibly bold move for first-timers, I know). Long story short, we tied for first place and both walked away with job offers. I still get a little giddy thinking about it. The full story is over here if you’ve got time to kill.

Where I’m At Now

I spent a little over two years at Dell as a software engineer. Somewhere along the way I ended up mentoring for the very same Hack2Hire that got me in, and helped organise Dell’s first-ever internal TMX Hackathon. I guess hackathons just have a way of following me around.

These days, I’m a Frontend Engineer at PayNet—Malaysia’s national payments network. I mostly work with Vue and TypeScript on the interfaces and shared tooling that the rest of the team builds on top of. It’s the kind of work people only notice when it breaks, which I’ve slowly come to accept is kind of the point.

The Perfectionism Problem

I’ll be honest: I’m a perfectionist, and not the cute humblebrag kind you put in a job interview. I once wrote a whole post half-defending Terence Fletcher from Whiplash, which should tell you everything you need to know.

I’ll nudge a layout by a pixel, rebuild an animation for the umpteenth time, and go back to things I’ve already shipped just because they’ve been bugging me. This site is exhibit A. I rebuilt it from scratch at the start of 2026, spent an embarrassing chunk of the very first day just picking dark mode colours, then fell down the microinteractions rabbit hole after buying Emil Kowalski’s animations course. It’s well past 300 commits now and I’m still not done (will I ever be? Probably not).

Was any of it necessary? Absolutely not. Do I regret it? Also no.

The ironic part is that people who’ve worked with me know I’m always the first to tell everyone to log off and take a break. Whether I actually practise what I preach is… a different story altogether.

Off the Clock

When I do log off, I’m usually out with a camera. My Fujifilm X100VI goes pretty much everywhere with me, while the Nikon F3HP comes out whenever I feel like slowing down and shooting film.

Otherwise, you’ll probably find me flipping through record bins, logging films on Letterboxd, or hunting down my next matcha latte fix (and ayam gepuk, if we’re being honest). Earlier this year I also went on a two-week solo trip to Japan, which turned out to be nothing short of life-changing.

If you’re nosy enough, most of it is documented somewhere on this site: photos, records, films, books and yes, even the places I’ve eaten at.

What’s Next?

Honestly? I don’t know yet, and I’ve made peace with that. There are still way too many things I want to build and learn, and I’d like to keep paying it forward the same way so many people on the internet did for me, starting with that random Indian guy on YouTube (wherever you are, thank you).

Anyway, that’s enough about me. If you actually read all the way down here, you deserve a matcha latte. (Not on me though.)