Did my late light meal first cuz I'm hungry and while eating some bread I remember some stuffs on training, teaching, and R&D.
I remember the times when I entered the teaching career but for a short time. I started with grade school from grade 1 up to grade 6 and I remember the kids loving me 🥰 and when I left that school in the province, the parents were wishing me back. The school admin felt I was a loss. The one thing I left with children there, at a young age they learned how to operate an IBM PC and navigate the DOS operating system (oh yes it was an old 286 PC). The higher grade levels, I taught them batch scripting, like how to draw a Christmas tree on the screen for fun and also how to process real world stuffs.
After finishing my BS Computer Science degree, I immediately found myself under a contract with DOST as a training facilitator for employees of NEDA on web development using LAMP stack. Turns out the government with all the money flowing from people's taxes, they don't want to spend big money, they want to get away with open source stuffs because it's free and because a lot of their infrastructure was also built using Linux servers and MySQL databases. The thing that actually brought me in this training facilitator role was my OJT with DOST and I configured their firewalls on their PREGINET network (imagine, they don't have a firewall when I came for my OJT 😅). So yes, I facilitated the web development training with LAMP stack back in 2004 with NEDA under DOST contract and the training was held on an AC cooled bus. Think of it as a mobile coffee shop 😅.
Then came a one semester teaching at a technical vocational school on computers and again the students under my class were happy as I taught them skills on Linux installation, administration, security setup, and networking setup on LAN and WAN via hooking up on the internet (was still dial-up back then 😅). And because I was a Microsoft Certified Professional since 2004 (I just got reminded of it but never really carry the brand in my resume nor my professional online profiles) I also taught my students on what I did in Linux but instead of Linux , it was Microsoft Windows 2000 Professional Operating System.
The last teaching in my short stint with it was a one semester work at my Alma Mater and I handled courses ranging from Assembly Language, Data Structures and Algorithms, C and C++ Programming, Object Oriented Programming in Java, Microprocessor Systems, Security, Computer Networks, and even handled an Environmental Science course when I was teaching the Computer Engineers apart from the Computer Science and Information Technology students.
Left teaching and went into an entry level software engineer role and was doing engineering and at the same time research and development (R&D) optimizing mainframe report generations by load balancing report requests without using a load balancer module. Everything was developed from scratch of course with the strict eyes of the old systems architect guy.
The next thing I found myself in the MS Computer Science program and that time was doing a lot of research work, research collaboration, got hired by DOST as a research staff (basically a scientist) working on the intersection of computer science and electrical engineering and yes, back in 2007 up to 2010 that project also involved using a machine learning library (AI was there already but have not reborn yet in the form of LLMs). The topic on that paid research work is different from the topics I been working on as a student including the research focus on Quantum Computing in preparation for my Thesis.
There was a point where I looked at the studies made by Charles H. Bennett and Gilles Brassard (1984) on Quantum Cryptography: Public Key Distribution and Coin Tossing, I was primarily interested on the BB84 protocol and this was something new at the University of the Philippines back then (mainly because the focus was more on P membrane computing and on Computer Vision, while Quantum Computing was not given attention) and so a visiting Computer Science professor from ADMU sat down and listened to my talk and it was about encoding information using photon and polarizing those photons eventually taking advantage of an inherent quantum mechanical phenomena that defeats the man in the middle attack without implementing any algorithm.
Such theme on R&D also came up from time to time at my career as a software engineer and I did not only help companies solve seemingly hard problems but also helped them save tons of money 😅. There was this company from Europe and has presence in PH, they were paying penalties for a specific breach in their contract with a client. It was brought about by missing a deliverable that no engineers in the company ever managed to solved. When I joined them I fixed it. It was no easy task but my knowledge from MSCS under the theoretical track (foundations and that means mathematical) made me implement a solution based from the insight on the relationship of time and space when it comes to computing, not to mention the algorithm that I invented to solve their problem on a millions of record flat file and that search is moving forward and backwards and so on.
Even outside academe and the industry, I do R&D be it a clumsy work to prove something or just being driven by curiosity and solving some problem. For one, when I was a kid, a broken walkie talkie I tampered with the antenna and made some clumsy device and that piece of walkie talkie worked even getting into the nearby police precincts' radio channels 😆. Also used that antenna on my RC toy car and it extended the distance of the controller from the RC car. Another is the primitive and crude AC to cool my room with a fraction of electricity, using a fan, a water pump, a copper tube made into a coil, a block of ice, and the understanding of the science of heat flowing to colder areas. Another is an exoskeleton I made for a cotton-tail rabbit I had with my family a long time ago to help that rabbit stabilize its movements because it was suffering from a neurological condition making it lose its balance during movement. Given that I have taken courses in chemistry, physics, and even in thermodynamics, if I will redo these stuffs, it will become much better 😎
Even when I was planning to shift career to PMC, I only gave it 5 years if it worked so that I can come back to STEM and pursue higher studies to give me more capability for R&D.
First, I have a strong passion for everything I do. Whenever I put my mind on something, I also put my heart on it.
Second, not making a grandeur of myself but I realized that I am not a single field of expertise person. I reach to other fields as long as it engages my interest and that I feel that learning from that other field will enable me to solve problems than if I not venture into it. Let's just say I am one of the few in this modern times that is considered as polymath.
Third, I listen to the whispers of destiny, I am sensitive to the calling. The passion that I feel I understand is not something driven by boredom. It is call to do something that I might not understand yet its use in the future but I must heed it.
I have this gift we call visions and I have many visions in technology that I failed to respond too. A vision about a CAD software to rival AutoCAD but my peers laughed at it. After more than a decade we now see other CAD softwares out there competing with AutoCAD. There is also this in-memory database that I proposed for my undergraduate thesis and my professional civil engineer professor handling the CS course on thesis laughed at it and said it is not possible. Now we see in-memory databases such as H2 and others. I also thought of an encrypted email long before even Edward Snowden told the world about invasion of privacy but my tech lead that time which is also a venture capitalist due to some trauma on one of his ventures, didn't trust me and so he didn't push with me with the idea of an encrypted email. Now we see encrypted emails. Also got the idea of a bomb attached to an RC plane, now we got drones with bombs in it. Also thinking of Quantum Computing but instead of exotic physics lab setups, I was thinking of adapting the existing materials that we have such as silicon based transistors on it and see now there are quantum computer prototypes utilizing this idea.
I do what I do with a purpose.
😊
