Every empire has
a first chapter.
Code at sixteen.
Senior high school. Sixteen years old. Stumbled into programming and never left. Most people that age were still figuring out what they wanted. I already knew. I just had no idea what it would actually take to get there.
College wasn't an option.
Financial setbacks made the traditional path impossible. No university. No safety net. So I got a job. Teleperformance. A BPO call center in Manila. Eight-hour shifts, headset on, taking calls. Saving every peso I could toward something better.
Zuitt. Paid for it myself.
While still working, I self-funded a coding bootcamp. Zuitt, Manila. I treated it like a professional, not a student. The stakes were different for me. The curriculum wasn't the point. The standard was. That's when the gap between finishing and excelling became clear.
Full-stack. Front to back.
Shipped real products. React, TypeScript, Node, Python. Built chat apps, reservation systems, a facial recognition experiment that didn't work but taught more than anything that did. The code was never the goal. Solving problems well was.
Precision and poetry.
Joined Gymlete as Embedded Head of Product & Marketing. Built UFITRA's brand from zero. Launched Verseva. I've never been able to separate the technical from the beautiful. I stopped trying to. The best systems feel inevitable. The best designs are engineered. I build at that intersection, on purpose.