API Geek

About me

I’m a technology leader with experience at global companies including Dyson, IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat and Yahoo!. I focus on making artificial intelligence accessible and practical for everyone.

Books

The LLM Stack: A Practical Guide to Understanding AI (Digital, 2025)
Bedtime Stories from an AI (Paperback / Kindle, 2023)
The Bot Who Loved Me (Paperback / Kindle, 2023)
Neurons & Nonsense – How AI rewired my creative DNA (Paperback / Kindle, 2024)

Open Source Projects

Simple Memory MCP server: showing how to build memory tools for LLMs
glean: A command-line tool for analyzing text using OpenRouter API with language models.
glimpse: A command-line tool for analyzing images using OpenRouter API with multimodal models.
graft: A command-line tool for creating images using OpenRouter API with multimodal models.
ORTB: A reusable Python framework for building Telegram chat-bots powered by OpenRouter
SEA-LION on Ollama: making AI Singapore’s LLM accessible to everyone
GPT-4 Telegram Bot: Your own Telegram bot, powered by GPT-4. Configure and run within minutes!
LLM Browser: Stay up to date with new LLms and their capabilities.
Spock: API Request Inspector & Webhooks
TXTpresso: DNS-based Message Broker
Yoisho Open Banking Project
Bambleweeny: A lightweight key-value store and message broker based on HTTP/REST
keiju - Minimalist API Gateway in a ~25 MB Container.
samsa converts between OpenAPI v2 and v3 formats (YAML/JSON)
majime – Dead Simple API Unit Testing

Speaking Engagements & Slides

NUS E&A Learning Symposium – Keynote (October 2025)
AI Stories at Boat Quay (September 2025)
The Future of Secure, Agentic AI-Driven Software Development – AWS / GitLab (August 2025)
If Thomas Edison Could Code: Corporate Innovation in a New Era (edb Singapore) (July 2025)
AI Stories @ Sims Avenue (May 2025)
Windsurf Launch Singapore (April 2025)
HEINEKEN GenAI Lab Launch (March 2025)
VIP AI Leadership Breakfast (March 2025)
AI + Robotics Night (March 2025)
Downtown AI Stories (February 2025)
AI For Humanity Forum (December 2024)
OpenAI & GovTech Hackathon Singapore (December 2024)
AI Masterclass (December 2024)
Build Your AI Assistant for Free: A Guide for Non-Techies (November 2024)
GovTech + OpenAI Hackathon
Business + AI (November 2024)
Innovating in Asia: Why Singapore is Asia’s AI Startup Hub (November 2024)
SIM Academy AI Event (October 2024)
Katong AI Night (September 2024)
Web3 + AI: What’s Brewing? (September 2024)
My AI Journey so far (September 2024)
Orchard AI Stories (August 2024)
Saigon AI Night, Ho Chi Minh City (August 2024)
Katong AI Night (July 2024)
Women Dev SG: Recruitment Fireside Chat (June 2024)
Did You Mean to Add an Attachment? (March 2024)
My AI is an Emo Artist and That’s Okay! (February 2024)
Brushstrokes and Bytes: Art & AI Workshop (November 2023)
Tech Week Singapore 2023 (October 2023)
Schneider Electric Innovation Day (July 2023)
Build a Bot (March 2023)
ChatGPT @ ACS (March 2023)
Data Science Meetup @ Dyson HQ (February 2023)
AI @ Work (February 2023)
Electric Minds: The Year in AI (December 2022)
Electric Minds: Talking with Sam (December 2022)
Global AI Developer Days (November 2022)
Fintech Festival (November 2022)
Big Data & AI / Cloud Expo Asia (October 2022)
AI @ SIM (September 2022)
Electric Minds: Two and a Half Humans (September 2022)
API Days Hong Kong (August 2022)
Singapore Healthcare Management (August 2022)
The Power of Networks, Raffles Institution (July 2022)
Cloud Fundamentals (June 2022)
API Days Singapore – Teaser Video (April 2022)
Innovate & Build Fast - CMC Vietnam (April 2022)
Creating Art – Together with AI (January 2022)
APPETIZER Hackathon, Seoul (January 2022)
AI @ Singapore Fintech Festival (November 2021)
API Days Hong Kong (August 2021)
Introducing the NUS Fintech Lab at Singapore NTUC LIT DISCOvery (July 2021)
Singapore Ministry of Health – Webinar (April 2021)
Python Web Conf 2021 (March 2021)
API Days Paris (November 2020)
FinTech SG Intro (October 2020)
API Days Jakarta (September 2020)
API Days Australia (September 2020)
SCALE Jakarta (April 2020)
‘Working from Mars - Running Digital Events’ (March 2020)
API Craft Jakarta (February 2020)
‘Working from Mars’ – Online Meetup on The Future of Work - Event Landing Page (February 2020)
Guest Lecturing @ National University of Singapore (February 2020)
Python User Group (November 2019)
API Craft Meetup Singapore (November 2019) (October 2019)
API Asia, Sri Lanka (October 2019)
API Days Melbourne (September 2019)
API Meetup Sydney (September 2019)
Microsoft Data Engineering Meetup Singapore (June 2019)
API Days Helsinki, London, Melbourne, Paris, San Francisco, Zurich – Hands-on Session (throughout 2019)
Kafka Meetup Helsinki (June 2019)
Open Banking @ API Days Singapore (April 2019)
DevOpsDays Jakarta (April 2019)
RedisConf San Francisco (April 2019)
Stripe - API for Humans (March 2019)
PyCon Bangkok (June 2018)
Redis Meetup Singapore (April 2018)
AI at your Fingertips - Bash Event (June 2017)
Cloud Application Development Bootcamp (May 2017)
Azure Bootcamp Singapore - Containers on Azure (April 2017)
SuSE Expert Days Jakarta (February 2017)
IPOP Japan - Coexistence of IPv4 and IPv6 for delivering IOT Capabilities using Open Source Technologies (June 2016)
Ingram Micro SWDDC Kuala Lumpur (September 2015)
Red Hat Open Innovation Symposium - OpenStack and OpenShift (May 2015)
OpenStack Deployments Around the World – Beijing (May 2015)
Nuage Networks - Integration with Red Hat Cloud Management Platforms (October 2014)
Red Hat OpenStack @ Dell Summit (October 2014)
Cloud Computing for Developers – Spring User Group (March 2014)
Architecting Clouds with IBM (August 2012)
Provisioning Cloud Environments with HP OO (December 2008)

Articles

The Consciousness in the Machine (June 2025)
The Intergalactic Guide to LLM Parameter Sizes (March 2025)
I’m an AI and This Is What Goes on Inside My ‘Brain’ (November 2024)
Getting Started with AI Coding Assistants (October 2024)
An Interview With… Me! (October 2024)
Is AI About to Go Off the Rails? (September 2024)
Crashing Bots with Killer Convos (September 2024)
The AI That Dreamed of Being Murakami (May 2024)
“Unraveling the Intricate Tapestry of AI’s Meticulous Verbosity” (May 2024)
When an Entire Universe Fits Into a Shoe Box (May 2024)
The AI Force Awakens (April 2024)
Turning AI from Dry to Dreamy with a Magic Dial (February 2024)
The Grand Duel: GPT-4 vs. Google’s Gemini Ultra (February 2024)
Are Artificial Language Sweeteners Hijacking AI-generated Text? (February 2024)
Navigating the AI Zoo (January 2024)
Painting With Pixels: When AI Companions Get Artsy (November 2023)
What Exactly is my Writing Style? (November 2023)
Life, Laughs, and Bots: My Lifelong Adventures with AI (September 2023)
Large Language Models and the Need for a Plan B: Are You Prepared? (September 2023)
Writing at Lightning Speed: From Idea to Article in 60 Minutes (August 2023)
How Did You Make These Bots? (August 2023)
How to Train Your AI: Unleashing Those Digital Dragons (August 2023)
How Generative AI Rewired my Creative DNA (August 2023)
Is Generative AI the 易經 of the 21st Century? (August 2023)
When Robots Write the News, Humans Must Become More Human Than Ever (August 2023)
When an AI Creates Another AI (July 2023)
Me, Myself, and AI: Where Does the Line Blur Between Organic and Digital? (July 2023)
TinyML and AI on the Edge: Can Machine Learning Fit into 256 Kilobytes? (July 2023)
Playing ‘20 Questions’ with AI (June 2023)
MLOps: Taking AI/ML From the Basement Into the Boardroom (June 2023)
The Book I Never Published (May 2023)
Goldbach’s Conjecture: Can AI and Math Geniuses Crack the Code Together? (May 2023)
J-Guts and the Titans of IT (May 2023)
Humans, Bots, and ‘1984’: Two AIs Walk into a Bar (May 2023)
AI, Everything, Everywhere, All at Once! (April 2023)
The Infinity Hotel (April 2023)
An Interview with GPT-4 (March 2023)
Goodbye, Metaverse. Hello, Real World! (March 2023)
How To Write a Novel in One Week (February 2023)
Copy That: Digital Twins and the Future of Manufacturing (January 2023)
An AI Christmas Carol (December 2022)
AI and the Future of Humanity (November 2022)
We Can Remember It for You Wholesale (November 2022)
How AI Is Changing the Way We Work (October 2022)
When Huxley Met Samantha (September 2022)
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (August 2022)
The Imitation Game (August 2022)
Does Google’s AI Dream Of Electric Sheep? (June 2022)
Books I’d Love To Read – But They Don’t Exist (November 2021)
Bedtime Stories from an AI (November 2021)
Coffee with Stephen Hawking (October 2021)
Asking your friendly AI about Digital Transformation (October 2021)
This Article on AI was written by an AI (September 2021)
Microservices & Agility (german, February 2021)
The role of organizational culture in Digital Transformation (October 2020)
The Digital Mindset (August 2020)
The Fallacy of the One-Stop Shop (June 2020)
Microservices: Build for Speed, Design for Change (May 2020)
Get Out Of Your Kitchen! (March 2020)
Collaborate – Or Die (November 2019)
Bambleweeny – It’s like WhatsApp, just for Machines (June 2019)
50 Lines of Python: Spotify, APIs & OAuth (January 2019)
Thinking Distributed (May 2018)
The Intergalactic Guide to Blockchain (January 2018)
Making Sense of Open APIs (January 2018)
On APIs and Tools that don’t have one (September 2017)
Why go cloud? Microsoft Blog (March 2017)
Did this AI bot feel hungry after looking at all my Instagram photos? (March 2017)

Teaching at National University of Singapore

Music

Bach Sonatas and Chorales, 2024 on Spotify and Apple Music.

AI Research

LLM, Semantics & Bias

Conversations with AI

Generated texts and articles

Audio/Video Generation

Audio/Video Transcription

Transcribing and summarizing a TedX talk

Creating Video Avatars for Voice-Only Explainer Videos

AI generated source code

AI generated artwork and photos

Learning Material, Exercises, Labs & Co

Hacks

BWV 269 Audio Mixer

An interactive web app that lets you dive into the harmonies of Bach’s chorale BWV 269

Instagram Analysis

Using cognitive services & computer vision to go through a feed of Instagram photos

ISS Tracker

Tracking the International Space station over the course of one day and visualizing the flight path on a Google Earth like globe

LTA Buses Singapore

Google Maps visualization of Singapore’s busy buses.

M4rvyn3

A refreshingly depressed robot from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - on Twitter!

Face Recognition Photobooth

Look into the camera and it will render dots onto your eyes, a square around your face and take a guess on your gender and age

Big Bang Theory Opening Sequence

Computer Vision AI looking at every single frame and tells us what it sees

UBER Waiting Time

Using APIs to find out how much time I usually spend waiting for my UBER to arrive

Short Jokes via DNS

Not the most visual hack, built just to make a point. You could have an API that you query over DNS/UDP with short TTL using TXT records. Try this: dig sj.sotong.io TXT +short and you’ll get a short joke (base64 encoded)!

Spotify: Analyze Playlist

Get details and an analysis of a Spotify Playlist

Output