Long before I ever touched Linux, back in the Philippines, I had a Hollywood idea of what hackers were. Then I found Eric S. Raymond's "How To Become A Hacker," and it quietly opened my eyes: real hackers don't break things, they build and fix them, and make them better. Its advice was simple: learn to program, get a Unix, and learn it inside and out. So in 2007, I went hunting in the Barnes & Noble magazine aisle and walked out with a SimplyMEPIS disc taped to a magazine cover. That disc turned a daydream into an obsession.
The obsession turned into a career. I started as a freelance web designer, grew into a web developer, and today I work across the whole stack. My design roots still show on the frontend, where I build fast, polished interfaces, but I'm just as at home behind them. I run my own database and web servers in the cloud, SSH into them daily, keep an eye on their health, and lock them down. I build CI/CD pipelines, and I chase bugs from the frontend all the way to the backend.
I've since worked for some great organizations, and I'm still a hacker at heart: curious, stubborn about solving problems, and unwilling to settle for broken systems. This blog is my way of saying thank you, and of giving back to the community of developers, sysadmins, and lifelong learners who gave me purpose and a career.
