#1 Financial Achievement

My mother told me earning your first million peso at 18 years old is a big achievement

#2 School PBLs

In our school back in senior highschool, we had this major projects every term called PBLs, in where you need to create a research paper about a particular problem and built an app on top of it.

I was against people who were academically smart, they were always ahead of me in every subject not related to programming, for a time in programming subjects I was ahead because solving problems in code was a new experience for me and I was very interested, but in time I did grew disinterested and they were ahead of me again.

But what was interesting to me was these PBLs as they were major coding projects. I didn't pay much attention to our research papers, as I wasn't every interested in them, in fact, in teams where I was the leader, I modeled our research paper based on the app I wanted to build, so we just passed whatever is enough to get a passing grade on our research paper.

But against people who I consider more smarter than me academically, We were able to beat them and get 1st place in PBL and twice

#3 Coding Competition

There was a two small coding competitions in our school, one for solo, one for teams, for teams you needed atleast 2 members in your team, so I asked a friend of mine to sign up for me but said he wouldn't be able to attend I told him its ok its just so I could enter.

In the team competition, you were given 3 problems, each allotted 1 hour to solve. I am unable to determine if they were difficult as I am unable to remember all of the problems, but I was able to solve all of them in around 45 minutes. The only problem I remember involved creating a parser validator to check if the brackets had valid closing patterns. For example, this is valid: {((){{[(){[()()[{[]}]]}]}}[{[][]}])}, and this is not: {([({})]})} (It's missing a bracket, also I believe this was problem was the easiest one)

For the solos, the organizers had 25 problems but they only gave you 1 and half hour to solve as many as you can, I was told that they don't expect anyone to solve all of them. I remember I was able to solve all of them with a few seconds remaining.

For this two wins, I was awarded 1000 pesos in grab food credits.

#4 Roblox Competiton

I attended this Roblox Competition held by Globe.

You were to create your own game based on a theme, I forgot what the theme was, but we built a dungeon game. You were only given 1 week to build the game, so during the day of presentation I saw that the other teams had very good games, so at this point I had assume we wouldn't win, so I left early. But for some reason we did, for this I received 20K pesos worth of prizes:

I am not able to tell you directly whether I am an effective programmer, as I would consider it a conflict of interest if I praise myself. But I have put my work in this portfolio, it would now be up to you to answer this question.

But I what I can tell you is that before Qitchat, I thought I was already a capable enough programmer, only to learn that it I was still lacking in many areas. For example when it comes to typing, I didn't understand why this was so important not until Qitchat's codebase became so big for me to work on, that I would see why typing is so important. Now I wouldn't even dare code something big in Javascript, Python, or Lua not unless these languages provide strong typing via 3rd party libraries or a custom version.

I also didn't understand why we were thought MVC (Model, View, Controller) structures in college, as I had my own way, but in time I found this to be insufficient, and refactored my code, only to observe that the newly refactored code followed an MVC like structure, what I found from this practice was that it ensured code readability, code maintainability, code structure and the developer experience felt just much more comfortable.

When I applied for an intern position in Petnet (Forex Branch of Union Bank), I was offered a position, however due to higher incentives with Infor, I had to decline, but they had me take a personality test on 16Personalities. These are the result:

Back in college, I consider myself very incompetent, I was very disinterested, I had aimed at creating my own startup and to drop out, as I saw being a college dropout as a mark of a great programmer. This objective led me to get failing grade on some of my subjects because I forgot to pass the needed requirements. Also on my second day at Infor, I wore shorts in the office I was told this was not allowed, they told me they mentioned about the dresscode during the initial introduction but I wasn't listening as I was busy fixing something on our sink, and only had my laptop on loud speaker, I just didn't take my first weeks at infor very seriously, as I was going to release a project just in a few weeks, and if it worked out I would drop out (it didn't). To continue on this story, I had assumed every tech company did not have a dress code as I went to an event at Google's Office in the same building, the host was a google employee who only wore a t-shirt and shorts it surprised me because I was told this was not allowed, on my internship at flowerstore.ph the entire building did not have a dresscode which was also surprising. This experience did leave a mark on me, as it was a mark of incompetency (haha)

To follow on my college life, on the day of graduation I was very sad, I was one of the few people amongst my friend groups to not graduate as magna cum laude, summa cum laude, or cum laude, as I failed some subjects, did not focus on getting good grades, and also I was not able to walk my parents with me at the stage as I did not receive any recognition (This was a privilege granted to students with recognitions), I became even more sad. I considered graduation day as doomsday as it was now impossible for me to dropout and have that achievement of dropping out of college, like many great people in tech, like Mark Zuckerberg or Bill Gates. But my mother told me that the opportunities of those in the US are different than that of mine, and that it was harder for me.

Had I had this mindset of finishing college, I would've changed so many things, I would've taken it seriously. First of all, I would've majored in Mathematics instead of Computer Science, as I believe problem solving skills is everything in programming, and everything you can learn about computer science is available online anyways. I would've tried with great effort to get into the Big 4 Universities.

It was only later in life, where I learned how valuable people skills are in starting a business. I wish I had looked at going to college from a perspective of building connections with many people, like going to events, connecting with like-minded people, I feel as if, if I had the opportunity to work with many people I would've been able to release Qitchat and overcome many more problems, and would be running my own tech startup right now.

I have many opinions on many things, but if I am to share something with you, is that I have this opinion about an old advertisement of my college.

The motto of my school is "Dare to be different. Be a Game Changer." In the advertisement, they were asking different students what it meant to be a Game Changer. Everyone had a collective answer, but basically, the main answer was that to be a "Game Changer" is not to be afraid of risk. With my current experience, I am of the opinion that such a belief is wrong.

If you are going to take any risk, especially if you are committing to something big, you should be very afraid of the risk involved. It is something that you should fear. I believe that if you are not afraid of taking any risk, you are not risking anything. I see being fearful of risk as a gauge to see if you are truly seeing the bigger picture, to see if you understand the consequences of your actions, and to see if you have a sense of what you're about to do.

If you are not fearful when you take risks, it tells me that you still lack a full understanding of what you're doing. In risk taking, I believe that what matters is, in spite of fear, you still have the courage to make a decision and move forward.

I think what I need improvement on is people skills. As I was born in with a stutter but not to point where it interferes with my speech completely, so I do take my time speaking sometimes, before I would try to avoid speaking in large crowds and just general public speaking, but now I found that this is wrong, as you won't get anywhere if you don't put yourself out there.

I had recently decided instead of starting my own company to try to get some professional experience first, so I could get a fresh new perspective, and to learn how to work as a team, as I believe my people skills are really lacking.

I remember my manager at infor, praised me for my technical skills but told me this is what I lacked but I never fully understood what this meant, it is only now where I made sense of it.

I hated my experience in building Qitchat, every problem that came with it I had to solve all on my own. The same can be said with other side projects, but Qitchat was my biggest and most memorable one, I found it to be a great teacher.

There are days where you feel as if, should a god exist it must really hate your soul. The frequency in which things will not go your way is so insanely high, that if you do not have a big enough reason to do what you do, its hard to imagine not to break, most of what you face might seem small, but those small challenges will be enough to wear you down you mentally.

Even though, I was burned out already, I still continued my development of Qitchat, as I really believed I had found an opportunity for it. But unfortunately, the problems were just so big enough, it was no longer out of my control. There were problems regarding regulations in social media apps, on app store, where it needed to have moderation, I had assumed when you put the app as 18+ above this would be suffcient enough, as I saw the example from telegram and other encrypted apps, where people are able to share anything, unfortunately I saw from apple's website that this wasn't going to be sufficient.

I am certain that I would be able to put moderation systems in Qitchat, but it will be expensive to run, as my resources are very limited, the risk was not worth taking anymore.

On the day, I decided to call it off in Qitchat, I was very dissapointed as I put so many hopes on this app. I thought that if this works, I would be more than financially secured that I would be able to pursue projects I am really passionate about.

On days where I feel so overwhelmed, You cannot help but be emotional sometimes, and I take a break, and you always remember your reason on why you do what you do, and continue working the next day.

On times where I am afraid, I no longer try to control fear, I find it too hard, instead I do it in spite of fear. I always tell myself that when I am judged, that I will tremble in fear, but I will do it afraid.

I find this quote by Machiavelli very inspiring, "Where the willingness is great, the difficulty cannot be great."