About Me

Hello! Welcome to my little corner of the internet! I hope you like it!

I am Kan Onn Kit (Ryan Kan), a Singaporean. I am known as PhotonicGluon online. I am a programmer by trade and a hobbyist writer and music composer on the side.

Character

I am often described as a level-headed person when making decisions. I consider the facts and evidence of the matter instead of relying (solely) on emotion and feeling. I am sociable and love to work in a team. Challenges appeal to me as they allow me to showcase my problem-solving skillset and develop solutions. From a young age, I was inquisitive, seeking answers to my questions. Curiosity always leads me to dig deeper into the reasoning and logic behind everything. That's why I am good at mathematics and computing and not so good at the humanities.

Learning and Education

I studied at Nanyang Junior College (NYJC) and the School of Science and Technology (SST) before that. My education there allowed me to foster teamwork and collaboration skills and develop a good work ethic.

Learning is a lifelong skill I am grateful to have picked up early on. I am fortunate that I didn't struggle in school that much. However, I'd be lying if I said that I've always been good at learning. The youthful me did not care for a second about studying for the final exam that decided my secondary school; I nearly flunked it. I was lucky that I had advanced placement in my secondary school, and it continued to foster my curious mind.

Programming and AI

I feature many programming projects on this website. Programming allows me to automate menial tasks that I need accomplished, sure. Still, the real reason behind them is that I can further work with logical systems to accomplish great things, systems that can assist people in transcribing music, systems that can play games, systems that perform video editing, etc. But my earliest public work was on AI.

These projects were simple, mind you. They were not going to change the world or anything. However, they allowed me to get a better appreciation of the new era of systems that are conducted by AI. Early on, I released Sredictio, a stock prediction bot based on Advantage Actor-Critic (A2C). This was a proof of concept, but it made me appreciate the complexity of AI systems silently dictating our world.

Music, Art, and Expression

My interest in music, specifically music composition, was recently developed, starting only in late 2021. It started out by just transcribing existing songs, but by late 2022 my interest in it blossomed to creating my own compositions. 7125 was released in early 2023 to express what I felt in the months leading up to enlistment. Back then, I focused solely on using MuseScore for compositions, but I slowly transitioned to using FL Studio for my later releases.

Both Dreams and Spectra were albums whose songs were made in FL Studio. Though FL Studio is more targeted at EDM makers, I focused on creating "contemporary classical" music. This challenge, in hindsight, allowed me to express myself more freely using music.

Music is a form of art, but that doesn't speak the whole truth. Art is the result of expression, and it is the output of a person trying to express their thoughts and feelings in a manner that others can understand. Expression is the raw feelings, ideas, and thoughts that the person wants to convey; the resulting art, be it literature, (literal) art, music, drama, movies, etc., is the best that one can do to put these expressions concretely.

Mathematics

It was during secondary school that I fell in love with mathematics. The way simple axioms and statements can create systems and methods to help us describe our natural world appealed to me. Still, the more significant reason I stuck with mathematics is its inherent beauty. That's why I continued to pursue mathematics after my JC years and took 2 years to write a whole book on abstract algebra. There is something about them that allows me to explore; they're a useful toolbelt for me to come up with new ideas and theories, test them out, and have fun exploring the wide depth of mathematics.

Secrets

Of course, some things are only meant for certain people to find. Sometimes, not everyone is expected (or desired by the artist) to find out or understand the true "meaning" behind each work of art. Sometimes, the artist wants to hide the truth in plain sight. Double meaning, per se. Steganography and ciphers litter my own works, for I don't want everyone to see the truth so plainly.

I have been interested in different forms of hiding secrets for as long as I can remember. Steganography allows me to convey a deeper meaning to my work than what the surface level could entail. It allows me to add a signature to whatever I do. Some messages are direct; others are targeted to only a few people. The intended audience of my messages could infer their true meaning without any issues.

Contact

• Email: [email protected]
• LinkedIn: Onn Kit Kan

I will do my best to respond back. 😊

Credits

Click here to see the resources used to make the Photonic website.