Every empire has
a first chapter.
Code at sixteen.
Senior high school. Sixteen years old. Stumbled into programming and couldn't leave. While most people that age were figuring out what they wanted to do, I already knew — I just had no idea how hard it was going to be to get there.
College wasn't an option.
Financial setbacks made the traditional path impossible. No university. No safety net. So I took the only real option available: I got a job. Teleperformance. A BPO call center in Manila. Eight-hour shifts, headset on, taking calls — and 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 — because for me, the stakes were different. The curriculum wasn't the point. The standard was. That's when the gap between finishing and excelling became permanently 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 beautifully was.
From engineer to builder.
Joined Gymlete as Embedded Head of Product & Marketing. Built UFITRA's entire brand identity from zero. Launched Verseva. Discovered that the craft of building a brand is no different from the craft of writing code: both demand obsession and an intolerance for mediocrity.