From Manila to Oslo

01Origin

I'm from the Philippines. I studied Information Technology at the Technological Institute of the Philippines and started working as a web developer in Manila at the end of 2011: ASP.NET, jQuery, converting ASP Classic sites nobody wanted to touch. The early years were client work at small companies, then an Australian e-learning firm, then five years at Cognizant on enterprise platforms for global clients. I learned the stack, but mostly I learned how software actually gets shipped: in teams, under constraints, on top of decisions someone made years before you arrived.

02Community

Somewhere in those years the community became the other half of the job. I helped lead Angular Philippines from 2016 to 2024: organising events, hosting, and coordinating with the team, and I kept helping out even after moving to Norway. I spoke a lot in those years too, at Devcon, Google Developers Group, PHINUG, Softcon, and across universities and campuses around the country, sharing what I had learned and the experience I had picked up along the way. In 2022 it went international: an in-person talk at Umbraco Codegarden in Denmark, and a handful of online sessions for communities in other countries. I never really stopped doing it, the format just changed.

03The move

In 2022 I moved to Norway. First at Kongsberg Digital, working on Kognitwin, an industrial digital twin platform. Now at SymPower, an energy flexibility company, working on software that connects battery storage to the European power markets: onboarding, telemetry, market pre-qualification, the unglamorous plumbing that makes megawatts tradeable. Different country, different domain, same job underneath: understand the system, then make it understandable to the next person.

04Now

That thread, making a system understandable to the next person, runs through all of it, and Back to Basics is the same habit in a new format. AI now does a lot of the work engineers used to do by hand. Back to Basics is how I keep my fundamentals sharp: going back through the core ideas, relearning them deliberately, and pushing them further than I needed to before. I do it out loud, on camera, in words I actually understand. It is the community work continuing, fundamentals over frameworks, explained plainly. If it is useful to someone else too, that is a nice bonus.

05The human

Away from the screen I play guitar, game online, and spend time with my family and our lovely dog. I have a daughter I play with more than I practice anything else these days, and my wife and I get through a lot of series and movies, especially Korean series and anime. That is most of it.