The Friendster Profile (Elementary School)
My first encounter with web development wasn't in a classroom. It was on Friendster, when I was in elementary school and wanted my profile to look different from everyone else's. What started as copying snippets from forums quickly turned into actually understanding what I was copying. I wrote CSS for animations, custom color schemes, and background effects. I added JavaScript for interactive elements — modals, scrolling navigation effects, dynamic text. Then I went further and wrote PHP to build a visitor counter and an authenticated chatbox that displayed the commenter's profile name to prevent impersonation.
None of this was planned. It was just a kid who wanted a cool profile and kept following threads of curiosity until he accidentally learned full-stack web development — years before any formal computer science education.
High School — The Mentor Who Made It Click
The curiosity from Friendster carried into high school, but what sharpened it into something more was a teacher: Carmelo “Melo” Diaz. He was my computer and web development instructor, and more than anything else, a mentor I genuinely respected. He saw potential in me before I fully saw it in myself, and that recognition mattered.
The grades reflected it — consistently 99s and 100s on quizzes and exams. But the scores weren't really about talent. They were about mindset. Believing I could do it was more than half the battle; the skills just grew from there. Sir Melo gave me that foundation.
Outside of class, I had another habit nobody really taught me: dismantling laptops. I'd take them apart just to understand how everything fit together, then reassemble them — just to see if I could. Pure curiosity. The same instinct that drove me to reverse-engineer Friendster CSS now had me learning what a heatsink does and why RAM slots matter.
The College Thesis (First Real Project)
For my senior thesis at AMA Computer College, I proposed digitizing my university's entirely paper-based administrative forms system. The core of the project was a custom WordPress plugin that could dynamically generate forms with conditional logic — showing or hiding fields based on user input, applying validation rules per field type, and managing submissions through an approval workflow.
The build was the easier part. The majority of the work went into the research: documenting the methodology, the development process, the testing, and the findings in a bound thesis. It was also where I first learned to think in flowcharts — mapping out every conditional branch of the form logic as proper flowchart diagrams, with decision nodes, process boxes, and defined flow formats, before writing a single line of code. A habit that stuck. It was my first experience of the full arc of a real project — from problem identification through solution design, implementation, and formal documentation. It also happened to be my first serious WordPress project.
Eight years of professional work later, I still trace the same thread: find the interesting problem, follow the curiosity, build the thing that solves it well.
