I'm the ETO — responsible for the electrical, electronic, and control systems on the ship. The power plant, the automation and monitoring, the nav and comms gear, and a long list of things nobody thinks about until they stop working at 0300 somewhere in the Malacca Strait. Ten-plus years on this now, across Anglo-Eastern, Euronav, Lauritzen Kosan, and Seaworld-managed fleets.

It's where I learned what "reliable" actually costs. You don't get to retry gracefully when a propulsion converter faults twelve hours into a thirty-day voyage — you fix it with what's in the locker, at three in the morning, while the ship is still doing fourteen knots. That job has opinions about software now, whether I want it to or not.

I build for the operational maritime world. Right now that's lightweight computer vision for small-craft collision avoidance, built for recreational boats that can't afford the six-figure commercial systems. Retrieval over ship technical manuals that actually works offline, because most ships don't have the bandwidth for anything else. And tools for Filipino seafarers: a flashcard app for licensure prep, payroll transparency, and the small workflow things that nobody with a VC deck is going to build.

Before all of this I did a Computer Engineering degree at Silliman, so the software side isn't a pivot — it's the part that came first, paused for a decade, and came back.

Small, well-scoped things. Honest scope. I'd rather ship something simple that survives a year in the field than something ambitious that impresses for a week. I'm skeptical of features built for hypothetical users and of demos that only work on the demo machine. Mostly, I listen carefully to what people actually do before deciding what to build. The sea taught me that.