About Me

I grew up in Vaughan, a suburb where nothing is walkable and everything is a fifteen-minute drive. It's why so much of my life happened on a screen: friends, games, and eventually the code.

My interest in software started very young, with my father. He came to Canada from the Philippines without much and taught himself enough about a fast-moving industry to build a career in it. What I admired then and still admire now is that he never treated not knowing something as a reason to stop. He made sure I understood I could learn anything if I put my all into it, and he backed it up by giving me my own computer. Pair that with a kid who loved video games, and you get my terrible Unity projects, which in hindsight told me I loved the process of building far more than the result.

I carried that into high school and did well in every course that involved code, but I came to realize that university was much harder. I barely kept my head up through a couple of semesters, where the work was in front of me and the reason for doing it wasn't. What pulled me out was building something I actually wanted to exist: Coverloop, a web app that stitches album and game covers into looping GIFs. I made this because I wanted it to be a real thing, not a demo or something flashy to show my friends. The attached GIF was made using this project and every frame is a reminder of why I chose this career and the joy I had building it. Coverloop taught me something I now plan around, which is that I do my best work when I care about the thing itself.

That's the same reason I chose York's co-op stream, and why my two summer co-op terms at Atlantic Packaging mattered to me: I wanted the experience to serve the degree, not to be something I chased after graduating.