Sean Michael

2001 — 2003 — In the beginning

Cilegon → Serang, Indonesia

Born in Cilegon, a coastal town on the western tip of Java, and raised inland in Serang, the capital of Banten — the province immediately west of Jakarta.

I remember almost none of it. What I have is my parents' account, which is that I loved to dance and did it constantly. Nothing since has come as naturally.

2004 — Exodus

Doha, Qatar

My father found work in Qatar and took my mother and me with him to build something there. Home was a single rented room with a wooden wall between the bedroom and the kitchen, and a bathroom in a separate building outside.

He once left the house with the only set of keys, and I had to make do with a bucket. It got better from there. It kept getting better.

2005 — 2015 — A decade of video games

Doha, Qatar

School was fun and I was never the athletic type. A serious share of that decade went into games — a DSi, then a Wii, then a PS3, until I gave up on consoles for a PC. Roblox at eleven, Team Fortress 2 at thirteen, Dota 2 at fifteen. That last one never stopped.

Somewhere in there I worked out how to crack Minecraft, because my parents wouldn't buy it. Learning the Windows file system and the command prompt to pull it off was, in hindsight, where the coding began.

2019 — A server and a Discord bot

Doha, Qatar

Last year of high school, and everyone was about to leave for a different country. So I hosted a Minecraft server locally, bought a domain and pointed it at the box, so the group could keep playing from wherever we ended up.

Then a Python script to automate the backups, and a Discord bot so anyone could start the server without me. Built from scratch, and the proudest I had been of anything. That settled the question of what I was going to study.

Built with: Python, Discord API, DNS, Self-hosting.

2020 — 2021 — University from a bedroom, Monash University Malaysia

Attended from Doha, Qatar

I got into Monash University Malaysia and then could not go. Borders shut, so the first year and a half of a computer science degree happened entirely online, from Qatar.

I met my whole cohort through a screen. Most evenings were games, or group study calls on Discord where we were of course not sharing answers. A strange way to start a degree, and I would not give the memory back.

2022 — Finally in Kuala Lumpur

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

The moment the travel bans lifted I was on a plane. Everybody had two years of missed socialising to make up for, so we made up for it relentlessly.

I had the privilege of joining a Christian student fellowship and eventually becoming its president. I also started working out for the first time in my life. The people I met that year are why it is still the stretch I would go back to.

Nov 2022 — Feb 2023 — First real codebase, JurisTech · Software Engineer Intern

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Months of applications with nothing to show for them, then a call from JurisTech and an interview process that genuinely tested me. I got in, onto the team delivering a loan origination and collection system for an Indonesian finance company.

It began as documentation, the way internships do, and turned into real design and build work — PHP against an Oracle backend, wiring our system to the client's own APIs. Good boss, good team, and the lasting lesson that most of this job is reading code you didn't write.

Built with: PHP, PL/SQL, Oracle, REST.

Jun 2023 · Final year project — Reading a room with Wi-Fi, Monash University Malaysia

My group picked the most hardware-intensive topic on the list on the theory that it would be interesting, and it was: device-free human activity recognition from Wi-Fi channel state information and visible light.

I learnt more about signal propagation, microcontrollers and deep learning in those months than in the two years before them. The rig ran on ESP32s with the classifier in TensorFlow, and by the end it could tell sitting from standing from running using nothing but Wi-Fi and light.

Built with: Python, TensorFlow, ESP32, Signal processing.

Nov 2023 — The piece of paper, Monash University Malaysia

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Bachelor of Computer Science, data science major, GPA 3.4. The coursework that actually stuck was the unglamorous half — databases, OOP design, software quality and testing. Those three still come up every week.

Then the ceremony, the paper confirming it, and goodbyes to friends and colleagues I have not stopped missing. I flew home to Qatar to start looking for a job.

Nov 2023 — 2024 — Dear Stranger, Shipped solo

Job hunting with nothing to point at, so I built something to point at: a platform where you write an anonymous letter and a stranger writes back. Next.js and TypeScript on the front, Postgres on Supabase behind it, running on Google Cloud.

Hosting, databases, auth, captcha, inference — I picked up most of it here. The piece worth defending is the moderation: a Hugging Face model scores every letter before it publishes, because an anonymous inbox without a filter is unusable inside a day. Reddit was kind to it.

Built with: Next.js, TypeScript, Postgres, Supabase, GCP, Hugging Face.

dear-stranger.vercel.app

Feb 2024 — Dec 2024 — Software Engineer, JurisTech

Remote, then Kuala Lumpur

Nothing was landing, so I asked my old boss at JurisTech whether a return offer was possible. He said yes, and the letter arrived two weeks later. I have not forgotten it.

The work permit took six months, so I worked remotely until it cleared and then moved back to KL. I owned system integration testing for phase 2 of the BFI build — mostly asking the client's technical users what was broken — supported phase 1 after go-live, and picked up a new joiner when he got stuck.

Built with: PHP, Oracle, SIT, API integration.

Jan 2025 — 2025 — Specialist Software Engineer, JurisTech

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Tech lead on the loan collection system for BFI Finance, one of Indonesia's largest multi-finance companies: its design and build, API integrations across several teams, scope negotiated so the deadline could survive it, and the production end-of-day batch, which is where you find out what you got wrong.

Alongside it: design and development on Adira Finance's loan collection system, loan origination for Bank Islam, and upgrades to SME Bank's. Plus training new hires, and an internal library so our systems could drive a receipt printer — the least glamorous thing I have shipped, and one of the most used.

Built with: TypeScript, React, PHP, Oracle, PostgreSQL.

Nov 2025 — On call, JurisTech · SWAT

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

I trained onto the SWAT team — the on-call engineers who are first contact whenever a JurisTech product breaks in production. For me that meant critical incidents on Tenaga Nasional Berhad's outage management system, batch monitoring for LPPSA, and BFI's end-of-day batch, triaging and fixing whatever data went wrong between our systems and theirs.

The worst of it started at two in the morning and ran seven hours. The cause was a third-party vendor who hadn't tested properly — simultaneously the most and least satisfying answer available. I owe that company a great deal. It was my first.

May 2026 — present — Biaskop, Side project · Solo

Indonesian media belongs largely to a handful of conglomerates, several with a political party attached. Biaskop reads one story across outlets and scores every article on five axes of bias, with the owner's ties in front of the model as it reads.

Behind it, a scraper and an analyser on Cloud Run that never call each other — Postgres is the queue. What I'm proudest of is the audit that keeps it honest: swap the ethnic or religious group an article names, re-score it, and see whether the number moves.

Built with: Python, FastAPI, OpenAI, Postgres, Supabase, Cloud Run, Terraform.

biaskop.com

Apr 2026 — Sep 2026 — Qashier, from a distance, Qashier · Engineering

Singapore

Qashier's engineering team got in touch. The interviews went better than I had any right to expect, and the offer was not one I was going to turn down.

I made it into the office for exactly one day before flying out of Malaysia to renew my visa. Four months of remote work followed, waiting on the permit. Second time round for that particular wait, and no easier for the practice.

Sep 2026 — present — Who gets in, Qashier · Engineering

Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Access control systems across all of Qashier's platforms: tightening the security model, and making IAM something that can actually be managed concisely — internally, and with the merchants running on us.

Which is as current as a timeline gets. I don't know what the next node says yet — only that I intend to keep growing into it, in the work and outside of it.