I grew up in Bohol, Philippines a place more known for tarsiers and white
sand beaches than tech startups. Getting into Computer Science at Bohol Island
State University felt like the first bet I placed on myself. I had no senior
dev in the family to ask questions, no local tech community to lean on. Just
a laptop, a dream, and a lot of Stack Overflow tabs.

This is an honest account of what happened between opening my first IDE and
landing my first real software engineering job.

Starting Earlier Than Expected

Most students wait until graduation to start working. I didn't have that luxury or maybe I just didn't want to wait.

In 2021, during my second year, I landed a Frontend Developer role at Yaramay
Corp. I was still attending classes, submitting requirements, and cramming for
exams, while also shipping real code for a real company. It was chaotic. Some
weeks I didn't sleep well. But it taught me something no classroom could:
how to deliver under pressure.

That experience rewired how I approached my studies. Every data structures
lesson suddenly had context. Every algorithm felt less abstract. I wasn't just
learning to pass, I was learning to build.

Graduation Didn't Feel Like an Ending

When I finished my BS Computer Science in 2023, I expected to feel relieved.
I mostly felt anxious.

The job market doesn't hand you anything just because you have a diploma.
I had two years of real work under my belt, but I still questioned whether
I was actually ready to call myself a software engineer.

Spoiler: imposter syndrome doesn't wait for you to graduate. It just changes
its costume.

The First Real Job After School

I joined ZongHa Technologies as a Software Engineer a few months after
graduation. My first full-time role. My first real taste of what production
systems look like when things go wrong at 2AM.

A few things that hit differently in the real world:

Code review is not an attack. My first PR came back with 12 comments.
I took it personally for about 10 minutes, then realized every comment was
making the code better. Now I actually look forward to reviews.

Reading other people's code is a skill. School trains you to write code.
The industry demands that you read, understand, and extend code written by
someone who may no longer be on the team. This is genuinely hard and genuinely
important.

Communication matters as much as code. I worked with a team across
different schedules. Knowing how to write a clear async update, flag a blocker
early, or explain a bug without blame these were skills I had to build
deliberately.

The Stack That Shaped Me

At ZongHa I worked heavily with Laravel and React. At KODA Kollectiv, where
I later moved into a Fullstack + DevOps role, that expanded into Next.js,
PostgreSQL, Redux, AWS (EC2, RDS), and Dokku for containerized deployments.

Going from "I know how to build a UI" to "I understand how this UI gets
deployed, scaled, and monitored" was one of the biggest jumps of my career.
DevOps used to feel like a different profession. Now I see it as just being
responsible for what you ship.

What I'd Tell Student-Me

If I could go back to 2019-me sitting in a BISU lecture hall:

• Start building things before you feel ready. You will never feel ready.
• Your first job will teach you more than your last year of school. That's not a knock on school it's just a different kind of learning.
• Geography is not a ceiling. I'm from Bohol. I work with clients and teams globally. The internet doesn't care where you're from.
• Take the freelance project. Take the internship. Take the scary role. The worst outcome is learning something.

Still Going

I'm still early in this career. I'm still taking Coursera courses on nights
I have energy left. I still google things I feel like I should know by now.
That's fine. That's just the job.

If you're a CS student in the Philippines wondering whether someone from a
provincial school can make it in this industry I hope this post is a small
answer to that question.

You can. Start now.

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Nicole Amoguis is a Fullstack Engineer and DevOps practitioner based in
Bohol, Philippines. Connect on GitHub or
reach out at nicoleamoguis15@gmail.com.