Hi there! I’m Darren. I love learning and helping others learn with me.

Experience overview

Below are some quick numbers (as of 2022) to illustrate the different experiences I’ve accumulated and industries I’ve worked on.

Software Development journey

I’ve been programming since I was twelve. I liked playing games, and I later on wanted to run my own game servers and build my own community.

It was super fun- like lego on steroids. In elementary school (2005), I would be excited to come home waiting for replies on forums for people to correct me with why my script-kiddie copy-pasted code doesn’t work. Ah, those were the days!

Formal education and research background

I finished my Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science in 2015.

I finished my Master’s Degree in Computer Science in 2019.

Computer vision

My undergraduate research (2015), entitled Real-time Markerless Finger Tracking, involved computer vision, augmented reality, and distributed systems.

Of course, this was driven from interests on games, anime, and the fascinating early ideas of augmented reality and human computer interfaces.

We performed image processing of a person’s single hand to determine the tip of a person’s finger. This was performed by four different mobile devices, and their predictions were then combined into a single prediction using a consensus algorithm.

Natural language processing

After my first degree, I decided to explore in a different domain of machine learning and AI. My master’s research (2019) was entitled Discovering Guidelines from Short Text, which involved natural language processing, a dash of linguistics, semantic analysis and parsing, and ontology building for a bit of meaning representation.

I learned loads and this master’s degree was super fun and I definitely grew a lot from this research-heavy experience.

Industry experience

For more details of my professional growth, you can read my LinkedIn profile. For now, I’ll provide a succinct summary of my work experience.

Summary

2011 – I’ve started freelance software development even before starting my university degree in software development (which completed in 2015).

2015 – I built a commercial rewards mobile apps (iOS, Android platform) for 7-Eleven, a major convenience store here in the Philippines.

2016 – I worked on building frontend mobile apps (Swift, Objective C) for SeriousMD until late 2019. With this same start up, I worked on a variety of other software development work, including a loan applications mobile app for one of the more prominent banks in the Philippines.

2020 – I participated in building RapidPass, a nationwide pandemic-response technology to enable our essential workers and healthcare front-liners to safely and efficiently ingress and egress in Metro Manila. It was during this period that I started actively developing my tech consulting business.

2020 August – I’ve joined US-based financial inclusion venture builder Talino Labs as a Full Stack Development tech consultant (2020) for DINEIN.

2021 – I’ve grown my role in Talino as the Lead Architect for BayaniPay, an emerging Neo-bank for Global Migrant Workers.

About the Sapalo.dev

I love thinking, and reflecting. It’s a big part of learning- to pick what to learn first and to do transfer learning (1) to leverage the existing schemas and ideas you’ve already built up.

Honestly, I was very hopeful at first with writing frequently on my blog, but I found myself settling for a once-a-month posting schedule. I found this, too, as a reliable metric for evaluating whether I’m able to reflect enough- or if my workload has been too extreme.

Companies

I’m the founder of Tome.gg and the owner of The Gaming Classroom. Both are spaces that encourage transfer learning from games and applying it in people’s every day personal and professional lives.

I’ve mostly been active in Twitter and also The Gaming Classroom discord community, where I chat with software engineers and gamers alike.