The Friendster Profile (Elementary School)
I first ran into web development on Friendster, in elementary school, when I wanted my profile to look different from everyone else's. What started as copying snippets from forums quickly turned into 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. I was a kid who wanted a cool profile and kept going until I had accidentally learned full-stack web development, years before any formal computer science education.
High school: the mentor who made it click
The curiosity carried into high school, where a teacher sharpened it: Carmelo "Melo" Diaz. He was my computer and web development instructor, and a mentor I genuinely respected. He saw potential in me before I saw it in myself, and that mattered.
I got consistent 99s and 100s on quizzes and exams, but I think that came from mindset more than talent. Believing I could do it was more than half the battle, and the skills 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. I was just curious. It was the same instinct that had me reverse-engineering Friendster CSS, and now it 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 real project from start to finish: identifying the problem, designing the solution, implementing it, and documenting it formally. It was also my first serious WordPress project.
Eight years of professional work later, it's the same pattern: find an interesting problem and build something that solves it well.
