It was 1995 when a 22-year-old Singaporean woman put our little red dot squarely on the map.

As a bright and gifted student who ventured overseas for further studies, one might think that she made some academic achievement.

On the contrary, Grace Quek stirred up major controversy and became infamous for starring as her persona Annabel Chong in the adult film World's Biggest Gang Bang, where she engaged in 251 sex acts with 70 men over 10 hours.

She's left the industry almost two decades ago and has carved out a career for herself in the tech industry.

In a recent interview with Vice Media, Quek, now 47, recounted her brush with coding and how she eventually found her calling.

During a private fetish session (which she did as a side business in 2000) with a client, she was introduced to the basics of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and at the end of it, managed to build a simple webpage.

She told Vice: "Looking back, that was my best hourly rate ever. I never got $800 an hour to write code ever again."

When Quek got a stint at a gentleman's club in San Francisco, she spent her downtime between dances tinkering with the club website's code and improving it. That was when she realised that this was what she wanted to do in life.

Being famous wasn't fun

Quek had several considerations for stepping away from the spotlight. Firstly, it "wasn't fun anymore", though she noted that "it was never all that fun to begin with".