Today I submitted my technical assessment for the AIAP – aka AI Apprenticeship Program by AI Singapore. It was like I went into a cave and vibe-coded with Claude for 6 days. The ball's in their court now.

This morning I felt a sense of emptiness.

There has been some collateral damage as my Bug Farm was not tended to diligently, causing the mealworm lifecycles to overlap in the same bins. If you don't know what I'm talking about, it's ok.

So, today I'm going to spend most of the day tending to my worms, then for Claude I'm going to test out some stuff:-

• Learning more about skills and structuring my coding workflows to utilize this feature
• Changing Claude's setting to “brutally honest”
• I have a mini project I codenamed “Under the Hood”, which I will start on and will update you soon

Oh yes, editing my video for Bernie Studio Delivery

Have a great week ahead!

#reflection #PositiveThinking

Can a solo-builder contribute to Singapore’s national AI mission? I’m pursuing an AI Singapore apprenticeship to help transform our local talent into a global export.

---

I recently had a realization while watching Dispatches from Elsewhere: staying quiet is a form of selfishness. In the show, Fredwynn tells Peter that by not sharing his perspective, he’s withholding something valuable from the group. That hit home. For too long, I’ve been a quiet solo-builder, but as I pursue an apprenticeship with AI Singapore (AISG), I’ve realized that my mission, and the knowledge I gain, belongs to the community.

Singapore has no natural resources; we only have our people. I believe AI is our unique opportunity to transcend our physical limits and export local talent to the world. To get there, I’m attacking this from three angles: building real-world solutions, earning technical certifications, and finally, refusing to be 'selfish' by sharing every step of this journey in public.

• First I will just solo-build, or team-build (I don't have many friends to start with actually), help my friends solve their issues, learning and building at the same time.
• Secondly, I will build my credibility by getting certifications, skills and knowledge
• And third, I will resolve to share more about my journey, because I recently realized that if I don't share, I'm being selfish with my knowledge. So ... I will share more, here on my blog, and also look out for upcoming videos on YouTube.

If I don't get the apprenticeship I will still keep building.

Thanks for reading.

#reflection #ai #apprenticeship #AISingapore #AISG #SingaporeTech #SoloBuilder #AIGovernance #SmartNation #CareerPivot #LearningInPublic

After two months of diving into machine learning, I’ve realized that data science is like performing an autopsy on a business problem to find the clues hidden in the facts. By treating data like a detective mystery, we can stop guessing and start building solutions based on real-world evidence and predictive confidence.

At the start of 2026, I jumped head first into the world machine learning (ML) and data science (DS), and I realized that I'm starting to look at the world with a new lens, and add-on if you will, where every problem starts with data.

I know, some of you reading this might say “no Bernie, we always start with identifying the business problem, and ask ourselves what are we trying to solve.” Yes, that too, but after that, you would hire a data scientist right? That's where I'm starting my story.

Why Data Science is like a Medical Drama

The clues are in the data. With every business problem, the data is like a dead body on an autopsy table, ready for the data scientist to slice and dice, looking for clues as to why there's a problem in the first place. I've always loved a good detective and/or medical drama, and now I know why. ML and DS is also like that. Find the clues, solve the mystery. And after we solve the mystery we can start building a solution based on facts, which can then point us into the right direction to collect, not just more data, but the RIGHT data. Ultimately we would like to be able to predict with higher confidence, the consequences of our future decisions and actions, so we don't make the same mistakes that would cause said problems to arise again.

So many examples from the real-world, like

• Hotel Industry: Reducing “no-show” rates by identifying patterns in booking cancellations.
• FinTech: Detecting fraudulent transactions before they clear by spotting anomalies in spending.
• Education: Analyzing student performance data to intervene before grades drop.
• Marketing: Auditing marketing spend to see exactly where the ROI is failing and why.

It can help us create systems and processes for better business ROI.

I've always wondered about such things. Why are things the way they are. Almost everything we see around us is a consequence of someone's decision and action – what made that person come to that choice? And by understanding their motivations (through the data) we can make better decisions for a future that we want, whether good or bad.

With the right and big enough dataset, we can predict (and solve) almost anything.

#ai #data #reflection #MachineLearning #DataScience #BusinessROI

Deliveroo has exited the Singapore market. It impacts me directly because I've been a Deliveroo rider for the last three plus years – it was my side hustle as I sorted my shit out and figured out what I wanted to pivot to. Even though I'm also on Foodpanda, another food delivery platform, Deliveroo is the best as it has a more direct fee system, for example, it gives you fee boosts vs quests, and the ONE THING that makes it so much better is that it allows riders to “reject jobs without penalty”.

Anyway, the announcement about the exit gave little runway for us all in Singapore.

Announcement made on Feb 26, and exit on Mar 3. Read the article here

WOW. And Ouch.

I'm not even sure the execs at Door Dash (the guys who bought Deliveroo) even know where Singapore is. Anyway, to them we are just a non-performer on a spreadsheet, bound for deletion to make the “books” look better.

I decided to make a video where I travel to almost every zone in Singapore in the little time left they have here in our country, as a symbolic gesture to the platform that allowed me to earn some lunch money while I noodle away at life. I will link to the video here once it is done, so stay tuned.

#deliveroo #fooddelivery #reflection

I've built my career on the wave of digital transformation. When I came back to Singapore in 2008, she was just figuring out what social media and Web 2.0 was. Me back then, hell, I was all about digital and social media, and very easily I was able to help companies migrate their systems, not sitting in IT, but in marketing and communications. Everywhere I went, it was convincing leadership about what SEO was, what content marketing was, what social media accounts to create, what is email marketing, what is inbound marketing, is cloud hosting safe, the list goes on. As I write this I could feel an adrenaline rush while remembering those moments, it was definitely an exciting time. I went from a web developer to creating a small agency, and then to the client-side, working with the agencies to scale digital and social media.

Fast forward to 2020, Singapore was now well-versed in digital and social media. I could feel the wave starting to subside. I've led the launch of two critical systems – a fully rebranded website, and a fully migrated intranet for SUSS, I was fatigued, jaded and bored. Somewhere along the way I had this goal of becoming a Chief Marketing Officer, but then I realized that my passion lies in figuring things out, solving problems, experimenting, building and launching. I don't want to build people, I want to build systems.

Then I got this fancy idea to launch a business and a mobile app for the urban farming community. So I quit my job, left corporate life, and went solo – started Bernie Studio. After a few months I realized that the idea just didn't have legs, I also wasn't able to prototype anything even though I swore to build it with no-code or low code. The business model was bad from the start. So I stopped. I didn't want to go back doing what I initially ran away from, so I spent the next few years pivoting. First I took a diploma in Urban Agriculture Technology, hoping that in understanding more about the landscape and topic I could get back to pursue my initial business idea. Then I started an online business with a friend, which gained quite good traction, I was surprised that we were able to make it a profitable business. It definitely gave me a sense of satisfaction based on my personality and motivations. I continued to potter on with various different projects that I was familiar with – content creation and marketing. I built up two niche YouTube channels, which taught me the discipline of publish frequency and sticking to a formula. On the agriculture front I realized my passion lies in insect farming, but once again, the market is not ready. So I started Bernie's Bug Farm as an experiment on producing high quality frass as well as eating mealworms as an alternative nutritional source.

I was getting bored by now without something big enough for me to build. Then circa 2023, after watching the keynote by Sam Altman and about OpenAI, I started thinking about AI and how it was going to impact our future. I tried using ChatGPT, like the rest of us, and wasn't really fully utilizing its capabilities. Early 2025, I had a nasty road accident with a car (I was riding an e-bike), which had me down in recovering for about 2 whole months before I was able to be back fully functioning. 2025 became my pivoting point. It was also the year I graduated from my diploma program. I slowed down content creating on my e-bike, and did more research into how I want to utilize my newly acquired agriculture cred. Nothing much hit, except for my bug farm, and freelancing as a workshop instructor for pre-school, primary and secondary school kids, which I quite enjoyed. It was nice, but I wasn't building, I was just doing. I was bored again.

Late last year, I stumbled upon a course from NTU that offered a certificate in Data Science and AI, which also offered career transition opportunities. After attending the briefing, I signed up. I thought, ok so now I have to really dig deeper into the AI stuff. lol, AI stuff. Just shy of 2 months ago I didn't know any of the terms used in the industry. Now, I understand the landscape, the connections between the different layers, and where it's heading. Not completely, but it's a start. Guys, I'm feeling all tingly again, the same feeling I had in 2008 with digital and social media. Excited about AI, but also aware of the implications and challenges to the environment, to people, and all that. This is what excites me – being part of a wave of transformation. I want to build stuff again. I don't have the full suite of skillset yet, but I now can “partner” with AI to help me get there faster than ever before. I literally spent January 2026 ramping up. My goal for this year is to complete up to 50 online courses, finish up the 6-month NTU course, while at the same time look out for apprenticeships, mentorships and just build stuff with AI tech. That, together with my bug farm, we can hopefully find the ultimate solution for food resilience in Singapore.

Time to ride.

Follow my blog if you are interested. Thanks for reading.

#reflection #ai