← Writing

Study & Career Journey Retrospective

Aug 2026 @ home-office

Study Years : Sep 2019 - Nov 2023

It all started in UKM, where we were introduced to Java. During those years the future seemed bright, with a lot of exciting things waiting. The coursework moved through most of the stack:

  • Java desktop apps in Eclipse
  • Android applications with Android Studio
  • Web programming with vanilla PHP, HTML, CSS and MySQL
  • Data engineering, doing ETL in Google Colab
  • A final year project in Flutter

Skipping the math subjects, as I hated all of them (yes, I am talking to you, Discrete Math). I joined a Flutter bootcamp under kelasprogramming.com and carried that into my FYP. From there, the opportunity with Terato Tech came up.

Internship (Terato Tech) : Sep 2022 - Jan 2023

The internship started well, because of my FYP: e-masjid, a personalised masjid management and community app where users get masjid features in their hand — e-sedaqah, asking Islamic questions, nikah appointments and more (https://github.com/marwanbukhori/e_masjid).

Why was it easy to get into Terato Tech? Because they had the same kind of internal project: Betaqwa, also a masjid-focused web and mobile app for local communities. So the work was familiar from day one:

  • Shipping features on the Betaqwa webapp
  • Building the React Native mobile MVP from scratch
  • A frontend landing page for KitaJaga, including the SemakHarga campaign

Junior Year (Terato Tech) : Jan 2023 - Aug 2024

Got absorbed into Terato Tech full time. My first task? Outsourced to a sister company called Silentmode, working on their product RONPOS, a fuel-retail POS solution. Mostly full-stack work in Laravel, Vue.js and AWS:

  • Planogram features
  • ESL (electronic shelf label) feature and design
  • Reporting: sales movement, fuel totalizer, and more

First Transfer (Silentmode) : Aug 2024 - Feb 2026

Having been involved in Silentmode's internal product and established within the team, I was bought out and continued at Silentmode officially. I started in a dedicated team called Site Business Operation, the major subgroup across the entire company, still doing the web dashboard thingy.

After around two months, the company needed to assemble a team to deliver the E-Invoice solution mandated by the Government for RONPOS. I was part of it:

  • An E-Invoice microservice in our ecosystem, Vue.js frontend, NestJS backend, serverless architecture on AWS
  • A team of almost 10 people, delivering for Petronas, Shell and BHP
  • After delivery the team disbanded, and I stayed on as maintainer and developer, shipping additional features as clients needed them

Then the company restructured and I landed in the BHP client team. With my cloud background I continued as the E-Invoice developer and on CloudBOS (the web dashboard thingy from earlier) — but we had no HUB developer, the backend for our POS system. In the first BHP team meeting I volunteered to take it, since it also uses NestJS, the same as the E-Invoice microservice. From there:

  • Mesra Card loyalty integration for BHP
  • RON95 subsidy integration for all clients
  • Bug fixes, deployment standby and support

Second transfer (Geomotion): Feb 2026 - Apr 2026

Why the transfer? Because I got married to my colleague, a fellow software engineer, and with department policy and everything... so yeah. It was quite a short stint, and I was one of the newest of only three members in the team. I handled DevOps, security and audit policy, all according to the audit documents:

  • CI/CD pipelines for all microservices
  • Introducing scanning tools
  • Fixing security issues in HTTP headers
  • Introducing rate limiters

I didn't stay long, as how the company structured the team, arrangement, and the working culture did not align with my personal career goal and aspiration. Still maintain a good connection to the people there up until now.

Third transfer (Verus Virtus): May 2026 - Aug 2026

After getting back from Japan I got an offer from Verus Virtus. I was their first software engineer hired, in a very fast-paced startup where everyone wore multiple hats:

  • Shipped the official website, verusvirtus.com
  • Built internal accounting software on the open-source BigCapital
  • Delivered my first AI project, a Network Configurator using FastAPI, Next.js and LLMs through the Claude API
  • NDA projects, shipping features daily, plus client-facing meetings, requirements and testing

It was a really good experience with nice colleagues, but it wasn't really for me: working nights and weekends, with full ownership of a project end to end — requirements, design, development, QA, deployment, client-facing, all of it.

Summarize

I love building things. Laravel and Vue.js, NestJS, Python with Django and FastAPI, AWS Cloud, a bit of DevOps and AI engineering — I've tasted all of these flavours across my career. I still keep in touch and hold good bridges with my ex-companies.

What I'm looking for next is a workplace where I can focus completely on my deliverables, improve technically and on the soft skills side, go deep enough to become a subject matter expert, and from there expand horizontally into other domains, whether that's cybersecurity, platform, AI/ML or something else.