June 1, 2026
If you're curious about what I achieved this semester (roughly from January until now), here's the full breakdown. Included are all the slides, links, and resources so you can hopefully grab the same opportunities for yourself.
Life & Side Quests 13
- Colored my hair brown
- Got my 5K run time down to 28m 16s
- Officially visited all 16 cities in Metro Manila + Pateros
- Got the largest library fine in UPLB history (sorry!!!)
- Replaced the LED screen of my friend's phone, guess this can be my backup job
- Volunteered for Pahinungod
- Sat in on random classes out of curiosity, COST 10, ABME 10, CMSC 173, CMSC 191, and more
- Did my first half-marathon
- Somehow hit 5,000 LinkedIn followers despite hating LinkedIn lmao
- Laid down drunk in the middle of Lopez Ave
- Demonstrated to my CS professor how to use Claude Code
- Ran Doom on an OrangePi
- Presented my final project on Computer Networking with a monumental hangover and got a perfect score
Speaking & Workshops 8
- Hosted Google Developer Groups: Build with AI Manila, in collaboration with Data Engineering Pilipinas
- Delivered an ML workshop on Iris classification for our org's applicants View slides β
- Gave a talk on Python in research at UST View slides β
- Got invited as a guest speaker twice to talk about Minecraft and engineering lessons Workshop slides β Β· Watch the talk β
- Guest speaker at Batangas Eastern College, crash course on presenting insights better View slides β
- Spent 40+ hours preparing and facilitating UPLB Data Science Guild's Python & R workshop for professionals See the post β
- Held a mock review for CMSC 21 (programming fundamentals) View materials β
- Went back to my alma mater SMCL to give a workshop on Machine Learning :)
Building & Shipping 8
- Built Room TBA, a search engine for rooms, dorms, buildings, colleges, and divisions at UPLB Try Room TBA β
- Created Elbi GradeSim, a GWA calculator and Latin honor simulator for UPLB students Try GradeSim β
- Launched my Minecraft server portfolio, 10+ years of server admin, plugin dev, and community building Explore the portfolio β
- Experimented with Three.js to tell the story of my Minecraft journey, kinda revived the writer in me Read Scaffolding β
- Contributed to OEIS sequence A322054 View sequence β
- Collaborated to make upsked.com/uplb, a class schedule tool for UPLB students Try it β
- Did freelance software engineering work
- Hit 10,000 contributions on GitHub (turns out private repos count, they're just anonymized)
Leadership & Community 9
- Led one of the biggest projects in an Elbi CS degree, a section of 20, teaching the team advanced Git, JS/React, CI/CD, and Agile
- Led two meetups for Sip & Scale in UPLB!
- Organized and mentored The Innovation Lab 2026, the inaugural hackathon of my CS org
- Mentored and judged the DataCamp Γ DOST-SEI data hackathon via START-DOST
- Partnered Pizza & Friends with GitHub to host a non-serious hackathon and slides party, a break from all the sigma vibes of tech Join Pizza & Friends β
- Established a student-led Discord server for my Institute
- Hosted a Cubao karaoke session with people in tech See the chaos β
- Served as photographer and mentor in Devcon Laguna's code camp
- Started a Minecraft server for UPLB Batch 2026
Academics & Research 9
- Nominated for one of the best CMSC 173 projects this sem! Check out KimiRoutes β
- Placed 11th out of ~50+ teams nationwide in Algolympics 2026, actually learned C++ and competitive programming
- Got a proper Codeforces rating See profile β
- Won UPLB COSS' Web Design Competition (early-sem side quest)
- Finalist in the Ateneo Blue Case Competition out of 600 participants??? We were shocked too β
- Attended PythonAsia 2026 with my Data Engineering Pilipinas fam!
- Tutored via TutorHub and personal tutoring in math, programming, and CS
- Completed the DOST Scholars' Leadership Camp, a 5-day bootcamp on nation-building, civic duty, and leadership
- Somehow attended research group sessions of a physics professor, listening to and presenting technical papers on physics-adjacent data analytics