Who Am I?

My name is Choon-Chern Lim from Malaysia, and I go by the name "Mike" in United States simply because people tends to mess up my first name. Now that I come to think about it, it is nice to have a nickname because if "Mike" gets into trouble, I can be "Tom", "John" and so forth. I have been living in Minnesota since 1999. I have graduated from Winona State University (WSU) with Bachelor of Science in Computer Science in 2003. I am currently pursuing Masters of Science in Software Engineering (MSSE) degree at the University of Minnesota.

In my first IT job, I worked at the WSU Software Testing Lab for IBM-Rochester to develop and test internal development tools for a year and half. I have been working as an Analyst Programmer at Mayo Clinic since 2002. In my current job, my primary focus is on J2EE application development. I have worked on several high profile projects, such as ORYX Core Measures and STEMI research project.

Besides J2EE application development, I have involved in the following:-

• Administered Websphere Application Server for my division.
• Installed, configured and maintained a wiki (more specifically, Mediawiki), viewCVS and Bugzilla.
• Experimented lots of open source projects, such as Log4j, Hibernate, Struts, JFreeChart, etc. I am a strong believer in open source development and I have continuously contributed my knowledge and skills back to the community by actively participating in the forums and SourceForge.net.
• Implemented SOA concept in my division environment. I have configured several JMS queues to the Enterprise Service Bus in WAS and wrote some APIs that enable co-workers to reuse the resources.
• Experimented REST service and SWT development.
• I also developed "Sokoban" game using J2ME technology that runs in my Dell Axim PDA (Windows Mobile 2003).

I am also one of the few rare breeds that is proficient in both J2EE and SAS, and I have worked extensively in the following environment: PC, Unix, Mainframe (OS/390 and AS/400), AIX and Linux (Red Hat and Mandrake).

My Vision

My main goal is to continuously challenge myself in accepting and solving much difficult tasks. I am a result-oriented person and I always strive for perfection. I constantly reevaluate my skills to push myself in learning more things faster than others.

Speed, Accuracy and Correctness.... these 3 words always comes to my mind when I work on anything. In this modern era where things are constantly changing, there is no time to lay back and just talk. Some people likes to yap a lot and gets very little things done. In the end, those are just empty talks. I always judge myself based on my actions because they truly speak louder than words and I am my own worst critic.

What Next

While I have been working primarily on multi-tier web application development, if there is an opportunity, I would like to be the pioneer in designing system infrastructure for an organization. Writing codes become too routine and easy for me, and I could not see myself doing that for the rest of my life. While I still enjoy coding, I am actually more interested in knowing if my innovative ideas work by transforming my designs from paper (or white board) into live products.