The Summer That Started It All
We built a calendar
People say life is a culmination of your choices. Some choices matter more than others—and for me, this was the one that started it all.
We wrote our first commercial software application in the summer of 2003.
We had just finished our junior year (or “3rd year” as we called it in Hong Kong). That summer, we were supposed to complete an “industrial training” (i.e., an internship)—a mandatory requirement for our degree. I remember Morgan Stanley was offering a highly paid internship to the top students in our class. My professor nominated me (I was doing well academically), but I didn’t even show up for the interview. I had other plans.
Earlier that year, I had pitched an idea to The University of Hong Kong’s Computer Center: to build an online calendar app for students—where they could see their classes and events from the clubs and associations they belonged to. We needed to build it that summer.
So instead of getting paid for an internship, we started a company. I put in all the money I had at the time—HK$20,000 (about US$2,500)—hired ourselves as interns, and built that calendar over the summer.
Was it a hard decision? I don’t even remember thinking much about it. Forging a new path to build something of our own felt simply exhilarating. We incorporated the company, convinced the business school to let us use one of their classrooms as an office, borrowed a few servers from the computer science department for development and production—whatever it took. We had limited resources, but we were resourceful. I just followed my heart.
What did the calendar look like? I had to go to the Wayback Machine to find a screenshot, and this is the best I could get!
It was a browser-based calendar—before the term Web 2.0 was even coined (that came in 2004). We used asynchronous JavaScript to create a native app–like experience: click and drag to create events, a pub/sub architecture—three years before Google Calendar existed. That summer, IE6 was still considered a good browser, and Firefox was still called Firebird.
I remember watching a video of Steve Jobs talking about the new iCal app for Mac (reminder: this was two years before YouTube). I wasn’t even fully aware of who Steve Jobs really was. I just thought, This dude is great—we had a similar vision for the calendar app, and we’re putting it on the web so anyone can use! Take that, Steve.
Unknowingly, we built a web app before web apps were cool. There were five of us. Co-founders Tony Sung and Reggie Chan were among them. We’ve been working together ever since—for 22 years and counting.
This was the first major fork in the road we took. And what an incredible journey it led to.
P.S. The HKU Museum liked what we were building and commissioned a project based on the same calendar. I met my wife—then a student volunteer—when I was providing customer support to the Museum. (Girls—this is how I met your mother.)