How I got here

I dropped out of college, watched YouTube tutorials on software development, and somehow got here.

That is the short version, and it is genuinely how it happened. The longer version is that almost everything I work on now turns out to be a ledger of some kind: business permits, barangay records, attribution pipelines, disk usage on a machine you own. I spent four years studying accountancy before I left, so I understood what those things were for well before I could write the code that keeps them.

September 2020

My first paid engineering job lasted a month. It was a stock-market simulator for the Philippine Stock Exchange, written in Laravel at a company called Etousoft. The next one lasted two: an e-commerce app in Flutter for Tienda PH.

I was writing about what I was learning while I was learning it, badly and in public, which is why my blog is called Misadventures of a self-taught developer. The second post I ever published offered three management tips, from someone who had managed exactly no one. It is still one of the most-read things I have written. I have decided this is funny rather than embarrassing.

Five years at MediaJel

Then advertising infrastructure, which is where I actually learned to build systems.

MediaJel sells programmatic advertising into industries the mainstream ad networks refuse: cannabis, alcohol, gaming, politics. Attribution there is a compliance problem before it is an engineering one. I started as a Solutions Specialist in January 2021 and built MediaJel Tracker, an open-source event tracking framework that ended up instrumenting over nine million users and carrying a seven-figure revenue line.

That took me to Solutions Director, then to Director of Integrations, and along the way to the work I am proudest of there: breaking a monolith into services, keeping a Snowplow pipeline alive on Kubernetes, and moving our data pipelines off Snowflake onto ClickHouse, which cut the cloud bill by ninety percent and made ingestion faster at the same time.

In 2026 they named me Outstanding Team Member of the Year. I was the first person to get it. For someone who learned this job from YouTube, that one landed harder than I expected.

I am still there.

And then, in September 2025, Zentech

A friend and I started a company to build software for Philippine local government.

The premise is unglamorous and very specific. There are around 42,000 barangays in this country, and the certificate you need to open a bank account, take a job, or register a business is issued by one of them. In person, during office hours, often twice, because the first trip was wasted. In 2018 the government passed RA 11032 requiring every LGU to run an electronic one-stop shop for business permits. By 2022, nineteen were fully compliant.

So we built BarangayOS and BPLS OS. They are live in Barangay Balud in Samar, Barangay Banilad in Negros Oriental, and for business permits in Ipil, Zamboanga Sibugay and Dumaguete City. BarangayOS is free for barangays permanently, because a procurement process is a wall most civic software never gets over, and the cheapest way past a wall is to not build one.

I am the CTO. I also still write the code, which is the part I would not trade.

Outside that

I run a Kubernetes cluster in my house under GitOps, mostly so that I break things somewhere that does not matter first. I build desktop and developer tools: Pachtop, a system monitor in Rust and Tauri downloaded about 215,000 times, and a handful of libraries people still install years after I stopped touching them. Right now I am building Songstress, a self-hosted music suite, because I wanted my own FLACs on my own server on every device I own.

I live in Cebu.