In 2025, I was part of the founding team of the first ever Singapore Economics League, an online olympiad open to students across the country. This project was built entirely from scratch, meaning a lot more work had to be done.
This project was…definitely a unique experience. Where do I even begin? Due to some personal issues, our previous lead developer nuked the github repo, discord platform, siezed the domain, left the project, and caused some members of the team to quit. Suddenly, our team found ourselves down to three members, one of who basically stopped replying to messages after a while, making it more of a two person team…
Honestly, this project was not a great experience for me. It really reminded me of how the corperate world was like, overbearing project managers, internal office politics, and just a generally uncofmrotable vibe. While I did have a lot of fun working on the technical aspects of development with the other active developer, as well as learning many skills and picked up some knowledge from him, I couldn’t help but felt unappreciated and unrecognized for the work I had put in. To me, one of my passions for programming is to see the things I built come to life and be used by others. Yet walking away from this project, I just felt like I had wasted a bunch of my precious time for nothing.
At the end of the day, while I have no personal issues with those in charge of this project, I have no desire to work with them on future projects again. I would never leave or actively sabtoage a project that I had already comitted to just because of personal issues, nor would I put in subpar work simply because of personal issues either. That being said, this has definitely made me a little more wary of who I work with in the future, especially when it comes to working with someone uninvolved in tech in the future.