Journal on rmrz

Switched to Mise

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 22:34:50 +0800

I used moonrepo’s proto for 3 months. It’s a solid tool—fast, written in Rust, supports multiple languages through a pluggable WASM architecture. On paper, it checks all the boxes for a modern version manager.

But I switched to mise this month.

The reason? Something stupidly simple: I could never remember how to activate a specific Node.js version in proto.

Every single time, I’d have to look it up. Google it. Check the docs. It wasn’t intuitive. The command structure just didn’t stick in my brain, no matter how many times I used it.

Stepping Back When Everyone Else Leans in Too Hard

Sun, 16 Nov 2025 14:19:42 +0800

Quite recently, I have had the pleasure (sarcasm intended) of witnessing colleagues with strong personalities clashing, each response doubling down with their side of the story.

One thing that I did notice is that on each response, their vision seemed to narrow down greatly, which can be dangerous when trying to reach a consensus. However, being the observer at this moment reminded me about the advantages of listening on both sides, helping me out see the bigger picture as more often than not, they would focus on selling their side of the story, and raising the gaps that they see on the opposing side. Taking note of these would actually help the onlookers see sides that they would have otherwise overlooked, and be able to “rank” them accordingly.

Creating Invoices in the command line

Tue, 26 Aug 2025 19:23:12 +0800

I stumbled upon this nifty invoice project, which is also available in homebrew: brew install invoice.

Usage is as simple as:

invoice generate --from "Dream, Inc." --to "Imagine, Inc." \
    --item "Rubber Duck" --quantity 2 --rate 25 \
    --tax 0.13 --discount 0.15 \
    --note "For debugging purposes."

I can even use a config file which would be a lot easier to maintain:

invoice generate --import path/to/data.json \
    --output duck-invoice.pdf

{
  "logo": "/path/to/image.png",
  "from": "Dream, Inc.",
  "to": "Imagine, Inc.",
  "tax": 0.13,
  "items": ["Yellow Rubber Duck", "Special Edition Plaid Rubber Duck"],
  "quantities": [5, 1],
  "rates": [25, 25]
}

This got me a couple of ideas to automate my invoice sending errands, one of which is to simply pull data each month and generate the JSON file and then pipe it to the invoice command.

Wifey Car

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 08:28:30 +0800

Almost a year ago, I joined Security Bank as a principal engineer. Now, that job opportunity came with some trade-offs, one of which is that I need to go to the office every now and then.

This meant that I won’t be able to drive my wife and kids to school whenever I’m at the office. So, I’m really glad that one of the benefits that I was entitled to was getting a car paid by the company (I had to pay a small percentage though, as I’m just an SAVP, but the majority is paid by the company).

Got a Piano

Sun, 17 Aug 2025 19:07:37 +0800

Our requirement was a real “Partner Mode,” where the piano splits into two sections with the same key range. The most affordable option from a reputable brand was the Korg B2. The cheapest we could find from a reputable brand was Korg’s B2.

We got this pretty KORG B2SP for a discount

Buying in their physical store is ₱2,000–₱3,000 cheaper than the price listed on their website. It’s a good price for a starter piano. I was hesitant to buy my daughter a more expensive model since I wasn’t sure the hobby would stick.

Microsoft Azure Open AI Hackathon 2024

Wed, 11 Dec 2024 20:29:28 +0800

I recently joined a workshop + hackathon event held in Microsoft’s Philippines office, centered around on using Azure’s hosted Open AI GenAI capabilities. I know, it sounded like a mish-mash of words, but that’s exactly how it was described XD.

Initially, I joined to set an example for the rest of the team to participate in the hackathon, but unfortunately, it turned out to be just three out of the whole Digital Technology Division that joined the hackathon, which represented less than 5% of the whole division >.<.

Leaving Inspectorio

Wed, 04 Sep 2024 00:46:00 +0800

It’s been over two years since I joined Inspectorio. I started as an individual contributor, but I was thrust into a leadership role right after my first month. It has been an interesting journey, and, much like my time with XSplit, I would attribute a great deal of my professional growth to this experience.

Over a month ago, I handed in my resignation letter, and I’m rendering my last seven days. I’ll soon be joining a local bank, so this is the perfect time to reflect on my journey with Inspectorio. My time here has been marked by unique challenges brought on by the macroeconomic situation that changed drastically on the course of a few months, which greatly shaped my perspective on various issues. I held a leadership position during a period when companies were hiring engineers aggressively and experienced the fallout that followed.

Grabbing details from Grab Food activities screenshot

Fri, 07 Jun 2024 00:23:21 +0800

Source code: Github

Since it was the end of the month, and I failed to record the expenses as we made them, I had to encode all of those data from apps like Grab to a spreadsheet for our family’s budget tracking.

But considering that I dislike repetitive work, I decided to create a tool for it. This time, I used Go to create the CLI tool just because I’m learning in the context of web services.

I Turned Down an Offer

Thu, 24 Aug 2023 08:52:47 +0800

I was recently offered a position as “Head of Software Development”, which is directly under “VP of Engineering”, but I turned it down.

The reason turned out to be because of my risk appetite. The offer was for a brand new startup based in the US that has yet to dip its toes into the market, testing the waters for its product market fit. Unfortunately, with the current economy we are in, it felt a tad bit risky.

When I Used to Work for Fujitsu Ten

Mon, 24 Jul 2023 23:40:20 +0800

I started working with Fujitsu Ten in October something, 2010. I don’t remember the exact date anymore. I remember it was Ate Shi that informed me about the job opening. I was ecstatic as it was (or is) a known electronics company.

The industry was embedded software for automotive electronics, and here’s where I learned about the actual practical usage of pointers in C. Here’s where I also saw how we used function dispatch tables to act like methods in a procedural language… heck, you would even see how they (the Japanese guys who wrote the base software that we were building on top of) implemented hashtables, and other necessities that we take for granted on a modern programming language.

Resizing images and uploading to GCP Storage

Sun, 23 Jul 2023 23:38:35 +0800

I am currently using GCS for the images in my blog, and I usually never resized images before uploading them to the bucket. I always thought that everything would be handled for me once I upload images to the bucket, thinking that there was already a built-in CDN on top of GCS.

This resulted in a couple of my blog posts loading large images that take quite some time to fully load.

Mazda Cx9

Fri, 23 Jun 2023 01:03:27 +0800

It’s been over a month since we got our Mazda CX-9 Turbo Exclusive. It wasn’t my first choice, as I was gunning for a Ford SUV at first, but because of how the agent I was in contact with handled the transaction, we ended up going for a Mazda, and I’m glad that we did.

Side note: I very much dislike Ford Cainta as they are prioritizing customers that went for an in-house financing scheme. I waited for my unit for four months only to find out that someone got their unit in less than a month because they took out a loan with the dealer.

Anniversary in Singapore

Mon, 10 Apr 2023 22:32:35 +0800

I distinctly remember that during the trip, I quickly did some doodles for the blog post about how we met on the last night of our trip.

The overall trip was great. But rather than going chronologically, I’ll break it down by category instead.

The flight

One lesson learned is that if you got a 2-year-old, it’s best not to get the kid their seat… My 2-year-old didn’t sit on her seat. Also, going economy should suffice if you’re all in one row. Just set the armrests in an upright position, and you got one whole row to move around. Also, I enjoyed my meal on the economy flight to Singapore compared to the business class back to the Philippines. AC enjoyed the business-class food though, so I guess I just chose the wrong food.

How We Met

Tue, 27 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0800

In exactly 3 weeks we would be celebrating our 6th anniversary, and after three months from that, we would mark our first decade as a couple. It’s prime time to reminisce about how we met in a classic Taglish manner.

The Encounter

For starters, we both worked at the same company, with me joining Fujitsu a year earlier than AC. Actually, one year kami hindi nagkakilala even though we both worked at the same company. Fujitsu IS a big company after all.

Sharing Screen Recordings with Kap

Sun, 25 Dec 2022 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve been a long-time CleanShot user turned CleanShot Cloud user, but recently, I’ve been trying to clamp down on my online subscriptions. With that, I’m trying to look for alternatives to the current tools I use, although it does not need to be a free alternative. I’m aiming to cut down the monthly costs, so I’m just fine with software that would charge for a one-time payment with free updates for at least a year.

Deleting Merged Branches

Thu, 11 Mar 2021 09:31:25 +0800

There was this one project that I was involved in that never deleted merged branches. Not only was rebasing to latest branch not the norm in this project, but so was squashing, thus there are a lot of commits littered all over the repository.

I’m not that opinionated on this matter though, as it falls into one of those “I have a preference, but I won’t force it on other’s projects”, where “others” in this case are projects that I did not pioneer.

Generate TS Interfaces from JSON or XML

Fri, 03 Jul 2020 09:31:25 +0800

While working on XJS 3, I had to frequently parse the XML strings that the XBC core is sending to me, and then create an interface for TS so that tslint would stop complaining my use of any.

With that, I created a tool to automatically generate the interfaces for me, along with a JSON output just so that I can inspect how the XML would look like when parsed.

Kahitsaan Random Restaurants

Wed, 19 Dec 2018 09:12:14 +0800

So I made a tool and I thought of blogging about it.

Background

I recently left SplitmediaLabs, and now I’m working remotely as a Senior Software Developer/Engineer for a consultancy (aside: contract says that I’m a Senior Software Engineer, but my company ID states that I’m a Senior Software “Developer”. Minor stuff, it’s just that I hate inconsistencies).

Although I’m working remotely, I usually meetup with the team at a co-working space once a week… And during those meetups, we always have a dilemma of picking a place to eat within the vicinity of the co-working space.

Image Resizing in CLI

Tue, 18 Sep 2018 09:31:25 +0800

For the past few weeks, I was looking for a new compiled language that I can make use of for my tools as I grew tired of Go language’s verbosity. I tried learning Rust, but as I expected, it was more suited for system projects, and found out how much pain it could be for smaller tools due to how strict the compiler is.

With that, I eyed for both Nim and Crystal language, with the latter prevailing as my language of choice for my personal tools. The first project I thought of using Crystal on was my image resizer CLI tool that I would use for the images that I would eventually upload to my blog(s).

On to a new challenge

Tue, 11 Sep 2018 12:31:38 +0800

I’ve been working for SplitmediaLabs for the past 4 years. To be honest, I always thought that I would stick with SplitmediaLabs for longer than my previous work, possibly till I am too old to work, as this company was the best company I had ever worked for. But alas, times had changed, and my current situation made another offer look a lot more attractive that I decided to take a leap of fate and grabbed the opportunity.

When we tie the knot

Tue, 17 Jan 2017 10:10:00 +0000

To be honest, I am writing this blog post way past my actual wedding day, and through the power of editing the post date… the blog post will appear as if I published this post at the day of my wedding :D

This is obviously a big milestone for us, and the fact that I now have somebody to travel with me on this journey of uncertainties makes things a little settling.