I am a full stack developer based in Cebu, Philippines, and I own systems end to end —
requirements, design, code, database, server, deployment, and the training that happens
after go-live. Some of those systems began as an empty repository and a room full of
people describing a process nobody had written down. Others I inherited, already old and
already load-bearing.
Building from nothing and rebuilding under load are different disciplines, and I have
spent years on both. Greenfield work is where I get to choose the schema, the boundaries
and the deployment story before anything hardens — and where the real difficulty is
usually the requirements, not the code. The other half of my work sits somewhere a lot
of developers avoid: large, old, business-critical codebases that cannot be rewritten
from scratch, because real people are paid from them every fifteenth and thirtieth of
the month. That constraint has shaped how I work. I plan migrations in reversible steps,
I keep a rollback ready, and I treat "it still works on payroll day" as the actual
acceptance criterion.
I build AI into systems where it removes a real problem, and leave it out where it
would only be decoration. The clearest example is attendance: a phone punch is worthless
if somebody can clock in for a colleague, so the mobile DTR runs face recognition in the
browser itself — the employee's registered face descriptor is compared against the live
capture on the device, and the punch is refused if the distance falls outside a tuned
threshold. No biometric image is shipped off to a third-party service to make that call.
That is the standard I hold AI features to: it has to answer a question the system could
not otherwise answer, and it has to hold up on a mid-range Android phone on provincial
mobile data.
The work I am proudest of is rarely the flashy part. It is a payroll register that stopped
silently returning empty rows after a driver change. It is a biometric attendance app that
works on a mid-range Android phone at the edge of a geofence. It is a fifteen-year-old
CodeIgniter application still serving thousands of users daily on modern PHP, because
someone did the unglamorous work of migrating it module by module.
I am currently open to remote work with teams outside the Philippines.
Deployed
