Shi Ling Tai is the co-founder and CEO of UI-licious, a low-code tool for automating user interface testing across browsers. 

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👋🏼 How would you explain your job to someone outside tech?

During the Lunar New Year, when relatives ask me what I do for work, I tell them "I talk to computers."

Jokes aside, I'm a software engineer. I'm very passionate about software quality and run my own company providing software testing systems and services.

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🧐 What's something about you or your job that would surprise us?

I'm sometimes surprised by the usual ways people use our automation solution. 

While its primary use case is for automating user interface testing, technically you can automate any kind of tasks you want to perform on a web browser, including booking your child's piano lessons every Saturday.

Work smart, not work hard.

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🏆 What has been the biggest highlight of your career so far?

Winning major customers like Mercedes-Benz and Salesforce were my biggest highlights. 

In the beginning, a lot of folks had doubts about our testing software and our business, and because of that, I had a lot of self-doubt. 

There always seemed to be a missing feature that made people hesitant about using our system, and investors often remarked that we didn't have enough customers or that the customers were too small. 

Having large enterprises choose our solution after evaluating incumbent solutions really validated that we've built a truly competitive product.

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🔍 What's a startup trend or space you're watching this year?‍

AI assistive tools for software engineers. 

It's getting more and more expensive to hire software engineers as the demand for software engineers is growing much more than the talent market can produce. 

It also takes a lot of resources and time to onboard and train entry engineers to reach a productive level of output and quality. No doubt, companies will want to increase developer productivity and train junior engineers more quickly. 

Right now, AI code generation tools are impressive for helping developers write small bite-size pieces of code and generate unit tests, but not great in the context of large code bases or large integrated systems. 

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💼 What advice would you give someone starting out in your industry? 

If you want to be a software engineer, be prepared to never stop learning about new things because technology changes very fast. 

If you don't like solving puzzles every day and prefer a routine, then choose a profession like accounting instead. 

My professors in university were harsh and told us that what we'll learn in university will become dated by the time we graduate, and it indeed holds true. 

I've worked in this industry for 10 years, and the way we build software now, 3, 5, and 10 years ago has drastically changed.

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🗣 What's one thing you can keep talking about for hours? 

I'm a PC gamer, and I'm currently obsessed with playing Baldur's Gate 3. 

I could talk for hours about character builds.

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🎥 What's your favorite movie/TV show? 

Finding Nemo.

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🍨 What's your go-to ice cream flavor?‍

Pistachio.

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FYI. We've edited this interview for clarity.