About Tan

Secret Origin

I was born in Tra Vinh, a southern province of Vietnam, escaped Vietnam on a little boat in 1985, after nearly 2 weeks at sea, food and water had all ran out, death was almost touchable for everyone on board, I was only 6 years old. We were rescued by an American supply ship, but according to my parents, if it wasn't because our boat were completely useless due to engine failures, they wouldn't be allow to rescued us base on some United Nation law.

We got place in Pallawan refugee camp, an island of the Philippines where I spend 5 years of my childhood. We got accepted by many countries, France, Cananda, Australia. We chose Australia and arrived here in 1990, but boy am I glad we did, I love this country, its culture and its people.

I have call Australia home.

Education

Started my education at Canley Vale Height primary school in New South Wales in 1990. Our family moved to Melbourne in 1991 and I've lived here ever since. Completed VCE in 1997, went to RMIT and studied Physics till 2000, there was no job in that field so I went and studied Computer Technology at Victoria University, graduated in 2004.

Careers

I started my career in 2004 as back end developer using mainly PHP and MySQL, HTML and CSS for front end, but to be honest I didn't like the back end side of work as much, its a bit dry, so I steer my career towards front end development more because I enjoy its dynamics, its more fun and colorful in a way.

I now like to call myself a front end web "Devigner" :-) Its a cross between designer and developer, although I must admit I am not strong on the graphical design side, but I am confident on the logical design bits, I believe good designs is good marriage between the graphical and the logical designs, information needs to be presented nicely and logically to engage the audience. What I do enjoy though is making good design "dance" through good use of standard base XHTML, CSS and Javascript (mainly jQuery really). I am also a Drupal content management system (CMS) developer, like how this website is made, everything here is dynamic and are editable by any average Joe, that's how I like to make websites.

I also loves my gadgets, I have all the iPhone series, and yes I mean all, even the first one which were only available in the US, all the iPad series, and I take my 15 inch Mac Book Pro mostly everywhere, my next toy would be the Mac Book Air for portability :-)

I play soccer every week on Sunday, even if it rains, yes our team are comitted to play even if it hails, we did it once 2 years ago and probably not ever again.