Cruisin’ in California
Kevin McQuillan speaks to PNG-born Freddie Apakali, who has landed big jobs with American entertainment institutions such as Conde Nast and Sony.
The beachfront city of Santa Monica in Los Angeles is a media city – home to many Hollywood celebrities, the scene for hundreds of movies, and the home base for media companies such as Sony Entertainment,
Universal Music and Lionsgate Films.
It’s also home to Papua New Guinea-born IT specialist, Freddie Apakali, who grew up almost 11,000 kilometres away in the remote Highlands province of Enga.
Graduating with a bachelor of science in computer science from PNG’s University of Technology, Apakali’s first job was as an analyst/ programmer with the Ok Tedi Mining company, based in Tabubil.
“I was one of 10 programmers,” he tells Paradise.
“During that time, I was doing mostly systems analysis: systems improvement, business improvement, systems support.
“But I had this bigger desire to develop software. I wanted to get to that point where I was able to develop and engineer and at least put together something from ground up, rather than just providing support and improving existing systems.
“So after four years I wanted to step out of that comfort zone and I began looking to where I could harness this interest.”
Apakali couldn’t find a suitable gig in PNG, so his only option was to either go to Australia or look north. Through family connections, he decided to emigrate to the US, and resigned from his Ok Tedi Mining job.
“I had no destiny, no set job, nothing. All I had in mind was that I would try and find my way and go from there.”
He ended up in San Diego, California, where he spent about six months freelancing, before getting a job in computerland’s fabled Silicon Valley: a job which involved travelling to Los Angeles and nearby Santa Monica.
I had no destiny, no set job, nothing. All I had in mind was that I would try and find my way (in the US) and go from there.
“It was pretty tough, especially when you come from a culture which has extended family connections. You depend on your family when you’re not working or otherwise occupied, so coming here to the US was quite different.
“Everyone else was preoccupied, busy, so either you get yourself busy or you get left behind.”
The move to the US and the work it led to has proved his ambitions were justified.
Contracts have included developing content management systems, developing applications, testing and debugging security features, writing new code to meet feature requests, and upgrading sites to cloud-based architecture, the highlight of which was the 2010 launch of the tazoodle.com search engine, a primarily cloud-driven system.
Apakali then worked solely for the Santa Monica-based Lucky Group, a computing subsidiary of the global media conglomerate, Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair,
The New Yorker and Conde Nast Traveller. “Today, everything is e-commerce driven. “Two years ago, they (Conde Nast) decided to go in a completely different direction. Instead of putting together traditional print magazines and shipping out print magazines with ads, what they decided on was a digital version of the
same magazine online, which we (the team in Santa Monica) built from the ground up.
“So with that digital version, readers are able to browse the magazine online, look through different volumes and, if you want to shop or buy something, you just click through that item and buy from the website.
“That’s what I did – I wrote and developed these programs, which allow customers to buy through the website.”
Recently, Apakali was recruited by Sony Pictures Entertainment and is now senior software engineer, at their main Studio campus in Culver City, California.
Apakali also runs his own software company, which he started in 2009, called Forrest Data Systems (forrestdatasystems.com) and consults for other smaller business houses that need software development help both in PNG and in the US.
“PNG’s software industry is still in its early days. There are a couple of developments that people are doing, but mostly companies buy software off the shelf, or they download an application off the web and then try to tailor that to suit their business.
“But there is plenty of potential there to customise and develop one’s own program. Because of people like myself and Dr Raula Kula (assistant professor in software engineering at the University of Osaka in Japan) we are taking the idea of software originality and innovation back to PNG rather than buying off the shelf to suit one’s business need.”
There are plenty of PNG youngsters capable of moving into this area, he says, and it’s for that reason he has joined a support group called the PNG ICT Cluster to help the younger generation. It involves mentoring through online communication platforms, LinkedIn and other forms of social media. The group has a dedicated Facebook page, which discusses how to approach programming, “constantly communicating with team members back in PNG”.
Seven years ago, Apakali married Yessenia Vargas, a Latin American he met in San Diego.
“So I spend as much time as I can with my wife and two boys, aged four and five.”
Later this year, he will bring his family for their first visit to PNG.
As for living in Santa Monica, “it’s somewhere way up there”, he says.
“You don’t have to travel too far to find anything you want. Everything is right there by your doorstep. Food is great. You can have the best food anywhere in the world here in Santa Monica. Nightlife, shopping, literally everything. It’s way different.
“But then nothing’s for free. It requires being able to sustain yourself and being able to live in this lifestyle. If you’ve got a job, money in your pocket, able to pay your bills, hey, no-one is going to stop you from living the life you want to live.”