I started in Electronics Engineering at Mapúa University, not cloud. That's where I learned power electronics and how systems fit together, finished in the top 10 of my ECE batch, and co-authored an IEEE machine learning paper on detecting mango pulp weevils. The engineering habit stuck with me: measure things and prove they work before you trust them. I bring the same approach to infrastructure.
Data engineering came first. I built AWS data platforms with Terraform and serverless architectures for big enterprise clients, then ran them in production, where I handled incidents, led the container security upgrades, and migrated a legacy on-prem Oracle warehouse onto GCP and BigQuery. Operating what I'd built is what pulled me toward DevOps. Shipping a pipeline once was never the hard part. Keeping it reliable and observable every day after was.
These days I'm a Cloud DevOps Engineer at a product company, building CI/CD pipelines, ChatOps workflows, centralized logging and monitoring, and secrets management. Off the clock, I run a self-hosted automation stack on my own hardware, because I'd rather understand and own my tools than rent someone else's.