Humans of Kontinentalist: Jasen

Back in August, we caught up with Jasen, our former editorial and development intern who called us from the other side of the world in the United States. He was instrumental in developing the rubber story, and is altogether a thoughtful and capable guy to work with! You can reach him via Twitter and check out his portfolio.

Hey Jasen! What have you been up to at Konti?

Editorially, I’ve been helping Pei Ying with research for the rubber story by reading academic papers and archives about workers in Malaya and Singapore back in colonial times, looking at the conditions of workers, and who and where they come from. It’s been really cool. I’ve learned a lot about developing in a professional context and in a framework with a homegrown back-end and front-end system. I didn’t really know how to code in Vue or React formerly, so it was nice to kind of have that structure to learn how to do that.

I also helped Bianchi with data cleaning and scraping work for the upcoming Thai song story. Yeah, I wrote web scrapers and scraped the interwebs for lyrics and album covers. And then I also develop things, so I guess I wear some different hats.

Were there aspects of the internship that you found surprising?

The internship as a whole. Yeah, for sure. I was under the impression that internships in Singapore are very sordid affairs, where you toil and suffer the ire of managers and long work hours. Not that there’s no work done at Konti or that the managers are not at the top of their game, but I really like the culture here. It’s much more collaborative, much less hierarchical. I feel like I can voice my opinions and my thoughts, and my concerns are taken into account.