Psychologists say that moving house and changing jobs are two of the most stressful events in a human life. Most people try to survive them once.
Me? I’ve rebooted my life four times.
I’ve gone from the kitchen, to an online store, to the ocean, and finally to the code editor. It’s messy. It’s overwhelming. And yet, it’s the only way I learned to survive.
Hi, I am Kevin. This is my true life story.
The Kitchen
I still remember the summer of 2013. I was doing summer school at UC Berkeley when I accidentally stumbled upon Gordon Ramsay’s Ultimate Home Cooking. His movements were smooth, cool, and fascinating.
That show sparked something. I started teaching myself to cook. It started simply—cooking a table full of dishes for friends who were politely impressed. But the real turning point happened in a Chinese restaurant. We had ordered four dishes for about $100, and my friend suddenly said, “I think Kevin’s fried rice was better than this”.
She probably forgot she said it the moment we left, but I listened. I went back to that restaurant and asked for a job.
They weren’t going to let a 20-year-old boy become a chef just because he watched some TV. But they let me work as a busboy—washing dishes, chopping onions, and peeling potatoes. I worked hard, learning how to work the wok just by watching the other chefs.
One day after the lunch rush, a chef half-jokingly asked me to make the staff family meal. So I did. When I tossed that wok, I didn’t drop a single grain of rice. I still remember their faces—they couldn’t believe a kid from nowhere could handle a wok that well.
The Ocean
After summer school, I told my parents I wanted to be a chef. My Asian parents said, “No, you won’t. You are going to business school”.
So, off I went to Shanghai to learn international shipping. When the pandemic hit, plans changed. I pivoted to e-commerce operations, learning Excel, pivot tables, and ERP systems. I got good at it—good enough to be named “Employee of the Year”.
Eventually, I made it to Cardiff University for my Master’s and landed a spot in a graduate program at China’s biggest shipping company.
I became a Voyage Manager. Think of it as a Project Manager, but the project is a massive ship docking at a berth. I coordinated ship crews, port workers, and logistics operators.
When the cruise business returned to Shanghai, I moved to managing cruise ships like the Spectrum of the Seas and Adora Magic City. I was the first one onboard and the last to debark. I watched sunrises from the buffet and stared at the sea level from the bridge. I even managed the maiden voyage of the Blue Dream Melody fully in charge.
The Move
During this time, I met my wife. But she was on a focused track toward a PhD in the UK. I had to choose between the job I loved and the person I loved.
Actually, it wasn’t a choice at all. I moved to the UK.
I didn’t come without a plan. I put my skills into a search box—Logistics, Power BI, SQL, Excel—and the algorithm spit out a job title: Data Analyst.
The strategy worked. I found a job in a climate tech company extracting data from carbon project documents. The work was challenging, not technically, but culturally. I had to map my knowledge from Chinese to English. But once I did, I excelled, even solving logic errors no one else had noticed.
Then came December 2024. A change in strategy led to layoffs, including my hiring manager. I realized that day might come for me very soon.
The Layoff & The Pivot
May 2025. The day I lost my job, I felt okay. I thought finding a new one would be easy.
I was wrong. First month: 100 applications, 0 responses. The gaps in my resume weren’t passing the ATS filters. Desperate, I listened to YouTube career coaches and started upskilling. I finished the Google Advanced Analytics course in three months. I learned Snowflake, n8n, agents, and got into “vibe coding” with Claude and Cursor.
I got more interviews, but I kept hitting a wall at the second stage due to “lack of communication skills” or candidates with “closer experience”.
I needed to fill the gap on my resume. My wife suggested a pro-bono opportunity on her project. She was the UI designer, I was the back-end developer, and we used an AI Agent as our front-end dev.
We built an app that is now helping five under-resourced schools in rural China. To make it work, I built an automated ETL pipeline to extract data from handwritten questionnaires since the students didn’t have smartphones.
The True Grind
Looking back, I didn’t realize there were connections between these careers. I was just trying to adapt. But whether it was the kitchen, the ship, or the database… I was always trying to be a problem solver.
I wouldn’t call myself a data specialist yet, but I am getting there.
I’m documenting this journey on my new YouTube channel. I have two projects I’m sharing:
- True Grind: A series where I record the 4-day process of building that OCR intelligence ETL pipeline, including the bugs, the struggles, and the breakthrough. (I also filmed myself cooking in between the grinding!)
- Travel Vlog: A lighter look at our road trip to Belfast and the Isle of Man.
If you are struggling with a career pivot, or just want to see someone building real tech from scratch, come say hi.