Hi, I’m Alfian.

I build software in Singapore. Here, I write about what I’m learning and keep photographs of places that catch my eye.

Writing

Notes on software, the things I build, and what I learn along the way.

Personal Finance Without Trust

I stopped giving my bank credentials to apps. Then I built the thing I actually wanted — a net worth tracker that lives on my device and never phones home.

Read the essay

Seeing What Claude Builds
April 2026
How I fixed the one thing keeping me tethered to my desk — and finally started getting my money's worth out of a Claude Code Max subscription.
Gracefully Shutdown your Go Application
March 2021
A walkthrough on implementing graceful shutdown for Go applications — from signal handling to concurrent cleanup with timeouts. Originally published on Tokopedia Engineering.

Work

Messaging infra, data pipelines, real-time game servers and search indexing.

The full history

TikTok

Jul 2025 – Present

Software Engineer · Singapore

Shopee

Sep 2023 – Jul 2025

Senior Software Engineer · Jakarta, Indonesia

Grab

Jan 2022 – Sep 2023

Senior Software Engineer · Singapore / Jakarta

Tokopedia

Apr 2019 – Nov 2021

Senior Software Engineer · Jakarta, Indonesia

Photography

All photos

A snow-covered peak under a deep blue sky at the end of a green and gold valley, with a pale blue river running through it

Water running down a dark rock face hung with roots, a shaft of light in the spray and green leaves overhead

Tiny figures walking along a snow-patched ridge against a flat, deep blue sky

People standing at the end of a wooden jetty over bright blue water, a dark hillside behind and a tree framing the right

About

More about me

I live in Singapore and build software for a living, currently on the messaging team at TikTok. This is my personal corner of the internet: a place for the things I make, learn, and keep coming back to.