Pheng Taing

My works for the world to see

Pheng Taing

Well hello there, let me introduce myself quickly...

Profile photo of Pheng

2001 Born and raised in Cambodia, my family moved to New Zealand when I was ten years old. 2012 Graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, grade point average of A.

Pheng graduates!

2014 Moved to the southern most city of New Zealand and taught IT papers at the Southern Institute of Technology. 2016 Opportunity in Christchurch presented itself so I moved there to work full time in software development. 2018 My partner and I embarked on a cycling trip from China to Portugal. It took 22 months and we cycled 22,000 kilometers (14,000 miles). 95% of it was on our bicycles. See more stats on our travelling blog.

Pheng and Matt cycles

2020 Arrived in London, bicycles intact and spirit high! Settled down and working in London. NOW Frontend/product engineer with a passion for beautiful and functional applications. Currently in a full stack team building a web-based trading platform for buying and selling cryptocurrency. I strive to deliver by solving business problems, thinking further than just the requirements, design and code. Design tools like Figma are always open alongside my coding tools.

Skills

Frontend: JavaScript, TypeScript, Less/Sass, React, Ember.js
Development: Jira, Agile, CI/CD, Claude Code, Gitlab Pipelining, Grafana Dashboarding
Design: Figma, Photoshop, Illustrator

Interests

Road cycling, tour cycling, running, hiking, scuba diving, bouldering, climbing.
Co-founded the Gayzelles Running Club, an LGBT+ running club in southeast London with over 100 members.
Lead designer for the Gayzelles branding, club shirt, and social media content.

Baking (occasionally bringing in baking to the office), playing the keyboard, learning languages on Duolingo (2000+ days streak) ‒ French, German, Spanish, Mandarin, Cantonese, Russian.
At home you'll find me cooking and baking, if my current home has a backyard, I'll be getting my green fingers dirty.

When I'm away from home, it'll be travelling somewhere so I can practice foreign languages, tour cycling between towns, or hiking some hills.

I like hiking I like gardening I like baking

@latest

Pedco, the blog in Angular

After completing my 2 years trip, my partner and I had accumulated plenty of travel materials, tons of cycling metrics and stories. Naturally, I made a travel blog with Angular and hosted it on Github Pages. "Pedco" is short for @pedallingcontinent (our "unofficial" Instagram travel brand).

Pedco - everything about our recent trip

Pedalling Continents Blog Quiz

Once the travel stopped and the world went into lockdown, it became difficult to create content for our social media followers. Using random photos from the travel that weren't good enough to be featured, I upcycled them into a series of pop quizzes using Instagram's Story platform. It got quite popular. The quiz was active for 24 hours and I shared the answers the next day, every weekend until the lockdown ended. A total of seven sets were made for different portions of the trip. Why not test yourself?

Pedalling Continents Blog Quiz - Think you know everything about our trip?

Coding Competition

At work, we had monthly coding competitions and I submitted a few entries. The theme is in bold and my submission is linked:

Kudos

London, UK (2020)

The pandemic forced everyone to work from home where possible. This meant that social interaction between my colleagues at IG was significantly reduced. I never thought I could work from home. Was there any choice in this unprecedented time?

To foster a supportive and praising working environment, I created an app within the Microsoft Teams messaging app called Kudos. The Power App connected with ease to the workplace's existing chatting channels and team information infrastructure. When someone wants to acknowledge and thank another member, they can raise a kudos on the app, which then gets shared to the entire team.

Additional features I have added to increase awesomeness, business/management appeal and competitiveness:

  1. Personalised recorded gif of ourselves clapping in the shared team channel,
  2. Each recorded kudos can be associated with some of the company's core values,
  3. "Team Kudos" is a leaderboard showing the tally of kudos that each member,
  4. In our fortnightly retro we dedicate time to look back at the kudos raised and every alternate retro.

Kudos - Good job for doing that thing you did.

Exam Generator

Invercargill, NZ (2015)

When I was the teaching assistant at the IT department of the Southern Institute of Technology, I saw the opportunity to automate the process of producing multi-choice exam papers. There weren't many options available that suited my need, so instead, I created one that was easy to use and format. The final product was a Java-based application which took in a text file for input and outputted HTML files (the Questions and Answers) which can then be printed. If you are sick of randomising test questions and want it done automatically with only a few clicks, give Exam Generator a try!

Screenshot of "Exam Generator" on top of the outputted Sample Exam

Karaoke

Auckland, NZ (2014)

During my university study, I studied Mandarin and German on the side with my Computer Science degree. I wanted to create something that will put all my newly acquired skills together. I made a website using JavaScript, jQuery and various other shared libraries. This personal project challenged my design skills which I had always wanted to work on. The end result included plenty of UI controls that improved the user's experience. Keyboard shortcuts, visual aids (animation on buttons, tooltips), and multimedia controls (sound and video). Select a popular Mandarin song and start singing!