Hey, I'm Ian.
Senior Software Developer. Based in the Philippines. I work on the parts of software that tend to catch fire.
I've been writing software professionally for around seven years now. I didn't plan it this way — it sort of just happened, the way most good things do. I started with the usual front-end stuff, got pulled into backend work, fell into distributed systems, and somewhere along the way I became the person who reads the MassTransit documentation for fun. Which is a strange place to end up, but here we are.
In my current role I spend most of my days thinking about message queues, Azure Functions, and what happens when services disagree about the state of the world. We run on .NET, Azure Service Bus, SQL, and a healthy amount of architectural debate. I've been deep in distributed systems patterns lately — outbox pattern, saga orchestration, idempotent consumers, the kind of stuff that sounds elegant on a whiteboard and gets weird at scale.
Before that I worked on a carrier marketplace microservice — my first real taste of high-throughput, real-time systems. Live tracking data, webhook pipelines, the works. It was also where I learned that "eventually consistent" means different things depending on who's asking and what they're trying to sell.
The stack I spend most of my time in: .NET / C#, Azure (Functions, Service Bus, Blob, a bit of everything), Node.js, NestJS, TypeScript, React, and SQL. I've done enough browser automation to know I never want to do browser automation again. I've written more Azure Bicep templates than I'd like to admit.
The university thing — I studied Computer Science but didn't finish. Still figuring that one out, honestly. It's one of those loose ends that I keep meaning to tie up but keep deprioritizing in favor of, you know, actual work. Someday.
Outside of engineering, I'm into the Avatar franchise — both the animated series, not the blue people one. I play a lot of Pokémon (yes, still). I have a dog. I used to play in a band, which is something I bring up at every opportunity because it's more interesting than saying I watch a lot of YouTube at 11pm.
I write occasionally, and I cross-post things here when I feel like a piece deserves its own home. The writing tends to be technical, but I try not to make it feel like documentation. There's already too much of that on the internet.