I was born in the city of Iloilo. My mother is a cook, while my father is a driver. Both work for mother's relative who belongs to a wealthy family. I attended elementary at the University of Iloilo and graduated in 1978. I finished high school at the same university.
I decided to take the entrance test of the University of the Philippines in the Visayas (UPV) held in Iloilo City with BS Fisheries Major in Inland Fisheries as my chosen course. Lady luck was smiling at me that day, and I joined the prestigious school in 1988. I earned the much-coveted diploma after six exhausting years in May 1994.
Having no job prospects yet, I spent a month, from July 18 to August 18, 1994, training at the Southeast Asian Fisheries Development Center (SEAFDEC) in Tigbauan, Iloilo. Later, I applied to Oro Marine Resources, Inc. as a Technician Trainee. I reported for work at their shrimp farm in Bogo, Cebu on September 7, 1994. After almost four months of hard labor, I resigned on January 2 of the following year.
Armed with practical experience, I became more ambitious and got myself interviewed and promptly hired by CP Group for the position of Marketing Executive/Technician in their aquaculture business. CP is a multinational company based in Thailand, so together with the others, I went on an adventurous training there, visiting various shrimp farms and learning the company's recycling system for more than a month and a half.
After the training, we were assigned to CP Aquaculture (India) Pvt. Ltd., which is based in Chennai, also called Madras at that time. I officially started work on May 6, 1995. Of all the things in India, I like the scenic beauty, spicy foods, and unique culture the most. I gained truckloads of information and experience, but most importantly, I discovered more about myself. I realize that my job doesn't suit my personality. After four years of toiling, I decided to leave the country for good. It was June 26, 1999.
I am determined to pursue a career in the IT industry. I wanted to be a programmer. To be honest, I never had any chance of using a computer before, but deep down, my gut is telling me, this is going to be the future.
A few days upon arriving from India, I enrolled in Advance Diploma in Computer Studies, Major in Multimedia and Internet at Informatics Computer Institute, then located in Delgado St, Iloilo City. It's a two-year course, after which I can start looking for a job. The very first day in school immediately confirmed that I'm on the right track. I enjoy solving problems mentally, and this is what programming/developing is about. I graduated in March 2001. On May 2nd of the same year, Informatics hired me as ITT Coordinator/Lecturer. I've spent most of the last three and a half years improving my skills while doing lectures. The challenge to test myself against actual software development pushed me to bid my teaching job farewell on November 8, 2004.
My big break as a developer came when I applied at Callbox Sales and Marketing Solutions. The business is a start-up call center operated by two American partners. I was promptly hired as a senior software engineer on January 18, 2005. The first two years were very fulfilling and seemed like a dream come true.
It must be noted that while working there, I got involved in several small-scale business ventures. With a partner, we put up a shop offering computer repair and software programming in Jaro near the CPU. Later, we expanded by adding an internet cafe. I also registered with Amway, a direct marketing company. When an opportunity to start a tilapia culture came up, I didn't hesitate to join hands with two partners. We operated a tilapia farm in Dingle, Iloilo. Not satisfied, I got myself emotionally engaged in a snack bar in Bacolod City. The bar was conveniently located beside La Salle University.
As expected, all these extracurricular commitments took a large chunk of my time and energy. The endless grind gradually piled stress and anxiety on my weary mind. Then one day, I realized this is not what I wanted. All the "busy-ness" hardly describes my idea of a “good life”. In a span of a few months, I got rid of all of my businesses.
Giving up the call center position was also part of the decision. Physically draining night shifts and an increasingly depressing work atmosphere shattered the illusion of what was once a “dream job”. I enthusiastically walked away from my desk that fateful day of November 15, 2009. Fateful in the sense that I will never be involved in any 8-5 work again.
Days prior to my resignation, I had already dipped my feet into what I consider to be the “real” dream job. I've heard from an ex-colleague about this “work at home” gig, and her vivid description of it seems like the kind of career I'm yearning for. She got me to be part of her team. Inescapably, after a year, the team broke up, and I find myself floating from one client to another. Ultimately, I got the hang of it.
And now, I'm still pleasurably banging the keyboard, churning out lines upon lines of code in the confines of my rented house. If you are interested in knowing more about my skills and the projects I'm involved with, check out my professional profile.
One auspicious day in October 2019, started my foray as a Realty Listing Agent. A series of events pushed the ball rolling. Months before, my family decided to sell a piece of property and I listed it online. Later on, more properties from acquaintances were added. Then came an unassuming inquiry from a broker in Makati using one of the links. She enjoined me to become her listing agent and offered a fair commission sharing scheme. Intrigued, I decided to grab the opportunity. Several years after that initial communication, we have already closed several transactions and added a Cebu-based broker to our portfolio of connections. Real estate is becoming a viable semi-retirement career for me.
Already past my prime, the writing on the wall is clear. I'm finding it more difficult to work long hours, staying up late until 11 pm is already a stretch, haha. Starting early June 2024, I still work for a few loyal clients, but I'm no longer involved in big ticket projects with tight deadlines. My development work is now more task-based and I'm spending more time on realty.
By August 2024, I'm officially retired from web development, although I still do maintenance work on my website and code for some personal projects.
I now have more time to tinker with my laptop and after Microsoft pulled the plug on Windows 10 support, I decided to replace it with Linux. I went for the ever reliable Ubuntu-based Kubuntu. After a few months, found it to be very boring, haha.
I became more adventurous and went distro-hopping towards the Arch-based CachyOS. It is a bleeding edge distro with its rolling release model. Spent more than a year using it, observed that the constant update is a laborious and time-consuming endeavor. Every update is an expensive data hog. Plus, through time, it renders the system unstable and I have to re-install 3x.
This prompted me to hop towards Manjaro for stability, but it lacks GUI tools for easy maintenance and optimization. Found this requirement in Garuda Linux's Toolbox. I've chosen the KDE Lite flavor and enjoyed a lot setting it up according to my work flow. It is an excellent distro and it is my back-up OS installed in a separate partition.
The itch for a rock solid, semi-rolling release model lead me to the immutable Fedora Kinoite. The update and upgrade(roughly every 6 months) is a smooth one-click process using the KDE Discover app. I love it, it is now my main daily driver.
My PC specs:
Product Name: Dell XPS 15 9560
System Type: 64-bit operating system, x64-based processor
Processors: 8 × Intel Core i7-7700HQ CPU @ 2.80GHz
Memory: 16 GiB of RAM
Display: SHP1476, 3840x2160 @ 2.5x in 16", 60 fps
Graphics Processor 1: Intel HD Graphics 630 @ 1.10 GHz(128 MB, Integrated)
Graphics Processor 2: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Mobile(4 GB, Discrete)
Pen and touch: Touch support with 10 touch points
Storage: 512 GB SSD KXG50ZNV512G NVMe TOSHIBA 512GB
Battery: DELL T453X
Operating System: Fedora Kinoite
Kernel: linux
Swap: 8 GB, zram
Filesystem: btrfs
Desktop Environment: KDE Plasma
Windows Manager: KWin
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Packages: rpm-ostree, flatpak, toolbox
Shell: bash
Terminal: Konsole
My preferred applications:
Fedora Kinoite, Garuda Linux, Manjaro OS, CachyOS, ShaniOS. Try OpenSuse Kalpa(TumbleWeed-based) if stable and production ready, or an immutable SlowRoll version once available.
Kernel: cachyos, zen, liquorix, linux. Set-up as boot options.
KDE Plasma, XFCE, Niri or MangoWC WayLand compositor + Noctalia shell desktop environments.
BTRFS, ZFS filesystems and snapshots. BTRFS Assistant, Disk Manager and Snapper Restore apps.
Limine, GRUB bootloader. Limine Snapper Restore app.
ZRAM memory swap.
EFIBoots EFI boot manager.
Konsole, Ptyxis terminals.
bash, zhs, fish shells.
apt, pacman, dnf, rpm-ostree, flatpak, toolbox package managers.
Dolphin file manager.
LibreOffice, OnlyOffice.
Okular PDF Viewer. Skanpage document scanner.
KWrite, Kate, Zed, VSCodium text editors.
Ark file compression.
Nomacs, GwenView image viewer.
Krita, Pinta image editor.
Kamoso camera.
VLC, Clapper media players.
Spectacle, FlameShot screenshot. Kooha screen recorder.
OBS Studio video recorder and streamer.
KDenLive video editor.
Tenacity audio editor.
Qalculate calculator.
Zen, WaterFox, Floorp, FireFox, Vivaldi, Flow browsers.
Viber messenger.
ISO Image Writer, Fedora Media Writer.
KDE Partition Manager, GParted.
ClamUI, ClamTk antivirus.
Discover(official packages, Flatpak), Shelly(official packages, AUR, Flatpak, AppImage), PAMAC(official packages, AUR, Flatpak), Bazaar(Flatpak), Klia Store(Flatpak) and Gear Lever(AppImage) application managers. Install or if possible replace native apps with, Flatpak, and AppImage for portability regardless of distro.
Motrix, KGet downloaders. Transmission bittorrent client.
FlatSeal Flatpak permissions manager
Kup + Bup(integrated with KDE Plasma), GRSync for local(external drive) backup. RClone Manager for local and online(Mega.io) backup.
Save Desktop(saves KDE Plasma desktop settings, Flatpaks, AppImages, and Desktop).
BoxBuddy Distrobox container manager.
KDE System Settings, System Monitor and FileLight disk usage.
Data organization:
Google Drive: Gmail, Contacts, Docs + Sheets, Keep
Drime.cloud: Pictures
Mega.io: Realty folder
Filen.io, Koofr.eu: Currently not being used
GitHub: Static landing pages hosting
Oracle Cloud: WordPress + Control Panel hosting
DropBox: WordPress backups
ImgBB: WordPress images
Portable SSD: Videos, Music, Pictures, Documents folders
My life isn't as boring as it sounds; it's not all about work. In my spare time, I do the following, in no particular order:
Reading, learning, and collecting information. We are fortunate to be living in this exciting period of human existence. There is so much development in IT, science, energy, health, space exploration, etc. What would be a better way to spend downtime than to read, learn, collect, and appreciate all of these?
Stock and crypto trading are an excellent learning experience. Studying the market is challenging and, at the same time financially rewarding if the analysis is right.
Blogging. In my frequent adventures in the world wide web, I would occasionally come across bits and pieces of information so useful that I am compelled to write about it. Blogging is my way of sharing to the world.
Peer-to-peer lending at Kiva.Org and Zidisha.Org. Just doing my share of helping others.
Trying hard to practice personal finance and green living ideas in everyday life.
Going places. Explored some parts of the country together with my tour buddies. The Philippines is blessed with lots of amazing wonders, both man-made and natural.
Playing chess at Lichess.org and FIDE Online Arena. Freopen.Org calculates the World Chess Champion Number for every Lichess user, and dig this, I'm #4 from 2 years ago to now, haha. The concept of how it is calculated is described in the website. To improve the one's game, there's ChessMonitor.
It's another exceptional mental exercise on top of programming.
Once in a while, I dabble with house design. Small but comfortable spaces inspire me. Check out my designs here and here.
Quality time with my fiancee, family, and friends. This may be the last, but it is the most fulfilling of them all.
So far, this is all that is about me, but I'm sure there's more to come. Life goes on and so will the learning and sharing.