// TL;DR
On 2021-08-01 I started a part-time developer job and a computer science degree in the same month. On 2026-08-01 — five years later to the month — I became CTO of that same company, RS Trophy, at 23. The path ran through four years of part-time work while studying, a 45-day full-time bridge, and one year at a SET-listed telecom. A CTO title at a small limited partnership means owning every technology decision alone, not leading an engineering org — and saying that plainly is the point of this post.
Two dates, exactly five years apart. On 2021-08-01 I started as a part-time developer at RUAMSUK PLATING LIMITED PARTNERSHIP — a trophy and medal manufacturer with a factory floor — the same month I enrolled in computer science at Thammasat. On 2026-08-01 I became its Chief Technology Officer. This is the honest version of what happened in between, with the parts a LinkedIn headline leaves out.
//Four years part-time, in parallel with a degree
From August 2021 to May 2025 — three years and ten months — I was RUAMSUK PLATING LIMITED PARTNERSHIP while carrying a full course load. The work was unglamorous and formative in equal measure: building WordPress and WooCommerce storefronts for the company brands (RS TROPHY started as one of them), wiring analytics and ads, and slowly moving paper workflows onto the web.
The honest observation about those years: a small company gives a student something no internship does — consequences. When the storefront broke, it was mine. When SEO worked, orders came in and everyone knew why. Four years of that teaches ownership faster than any curriculum.
//The 45-day bridge
In June 2025, straight out of the degree, I converted to full-time — and left 45 days later, on 2025-07-15, for Jasmine Technology Solution. Both sides knew the shape of it at the time: the conversion kept continuity while I finished handover, and the move was already planned. I have mixed feelings about how clean that reads in hindsight, but the proof it ended well is the rest of this story — thirteen months later the same company asked me back to run technology.
//One year at a listed company
The Jasmine Technology Solution year was the counterweight to everything the small-company years could not teach. On LOOKLOOK PET Platform I worked inside a real engineering team — microservices over a message bus, code review, release processes, other people’s architectural decisions that I had to understand before I was allowed to dislike them. I owned about 55% of the commits on the B2B partner portal, which also means someone else owned the other 45% — coordinating that was the actual lesson.
The transitions on both ends were zero-day: RS ended 2025-07-15, JTS started 2025-07-16; JTS ended 2026-07-31, the CTO role started 2026-08-01. Not a day of gap in either direction. I did not plan it as a symbol, but it is an accurate one — each role was the direct continuation of the last.
//What "CTO" means at a small limited partnership
Here is the scoping a title like this owes you. RS Trophy is a small limited partnership, not a tech company. My CTO role has no engineering org under it — it is total technology ownership by one person: technical strategy, then also building every system myself, from architecture to deployment. It includes the unglamorous whole of it — IT support, hardware, networking, and technology procurement across an office and a factory floor. I am also the sole PM, PO and designer, which mostly means the person who writes the spec argues with the person who implements it inside one head.
Is that a "real" CTO job? It is a real version of one — the version where the title measures breadth of responsibility, not headcount. A CTO at a listed company and I share maybe a third of a job description. I would rather state that plainly than let the title imply the other two thirds.
//Why come back
- Leverage: at a small company, one good technical decision changes the whole business. The distance between shipping and impact is a day, not a quarter.
- Trust already earned: five years of history means no probation period on judgment — the mandate was total from day one.
- The work is genuinely full-stack: strategy in the morning, a Bun monorepo in the afternoon, a factory-floor network problem at five.
// What I'd Do Differently
- Stay long enough somewhere for your work to have consequences you personally absorb. That, not the stack, is what compounds.
- Leaving was necessary: the year away is what made coming back a promotion instead of a continuation.
- Scope your own title before someone else does. "CTO of a small LP, org of one" is a stronger sentence than an unqualified "CTO" — because it is verifiable.
FAQ
4Q1 //Can you become a CTO without big-company experience?
At a small company, yes — the role is total ownership rather than org leadership. My path was five years of accumulating trust at one company (four of them part-time as a student), plus exactly one year inside a larger engineering team to see how structured teams actually work. The title measures responsibility breadth, and that you can build early.
Q2 //Is a CTO title at a small company meaningful?
It is meaningful and it is different — and both halves matter. Meaningful: every technology decision, budget, and failure is genuinely yours. Different: there is no engineering org, so it develops ownership and range rather than management skills. Stating that scope plainly makes the title credible; letting it imply a big-company role does the opposite.
Q3 //Should you go back to a former employer?
It worked for me under specific conditions: I left cleanly with handover, stayed away long enough to bring back something new (a year of team-scale engineering practice), and returned one level up with a broader mandate. A boomerang without any of those three is just going back.
Q4 //What does a CTO actually do at a small manufacturer?
Everything technical, literally: web applications and infrastructure, CI/CD and reliability, IT support, hardware and networking for the office and factory, technology procurement and vendor management, plus product documentation and roadmaps. The software half looks like a startup CTO-of-one; the other half looks like an IT department of one. Both halves are the job.