In 2003, while in SAJC, my best buddy, Kah Meng, and I joined the NTU-JC-DSTA-DSO Challenge, and the SAJC team won the Volex Best Innovation Award for IT/Nanotechnology.
‘Nanogeex’ was coined when Kah Meng and I were tasked to share some information on nanotechnology to the rest of our team, in preparation for the competition, which had Materials Engineering as its theme. The original name was ‘Nano Geeks’: the reason for ‘nano’ should be evident by now; ‘geeks’ was chosen probably because both of us were the only people from the Computing class.
Our friendship blossomed further through the competition, as well as through embarking on mini web development projects, most of which have yet to bloom to maturity. We jointly purchased nanogeex.com as a hosting platform (nanogeeks.com was not available) for our projects, and also as a stamp of our commitment to the journey of our dreams.
One project was an application to assist in the school’s Project Work management. It was to be named “NanoPW”. We proposed it to our Computing teacher, Mr Chris Yit, and very soon, we managed to have a meeting, our first business meeting, with the Vice Principal, Ms Mabel Chia. We were so excited that we even worked at night to prepare a prototype for the application. Unfortunately, as it turned out, the school’s regulations were forbidding, and our project had to be discontinued.
But we were not discouraged. In fact, this paved way for more ideas, which we stored in a private wiki, and some of which we attempted to implement.
However, the exigencies of academic pursuit (Kah Meng had a scholarship, whereas I, had my parent’s expectations) took over the helm of our attention, and our work was suspended. This inactivity was later prolonged by my term of National Service, and Kah Meng’s university commitments and (co-)founding of a new game company, Exoro Pte Ltd.
Later, Kah Meng focused his energy on nurturing his new child, Exoro; and amidst that, he also started MangoOrange.com, the home for the world-famous Wordpress theme, called i3theme. He moved out of Nanogeex.com as his new domain name provided more capacity.
I continued to maintain a personal blog at introspectif.nanogeex.com, and later moved out for a sojourn at mahalkita.wordpress.com (now dead). After finding Wordpress.com’s service restrictive, I moved back to mahalkita.nanogeex.com, and continued to host my web experiments and projects here.
And that was the story of Nanogeex.
This is probably not the best story you have heard, but to myself, it is the story of the best time of my life. I believe it’s the same for Kah Meng too.
Yes, we were young.
Yes, we were naive.
But the best of treasures was the experience in our working together, and our constant dreaming (which we do until now) on how to strike it BIG, albeit a baby step at a time.
I created this site to revive these dreams, and put them into action again. Even if Kah Meng does not wish to go with me (and I would understand his position), I will still continue my pursuit: to realise the dreams of the Nano Geeks.