A decade of Ruby on Rails, now React and TypeScript on top.

Most of what I have shipped runs on Ruby on Rails. More than a decade of back ends, and the products built on top of them. As co-founder, CTO and sole developer of Shop Ketti — a New York B2B wholesale marketplace for pet retailers — I inherited a prototype and rewrote it end to end into the system that still runs the business today. Around and after that: bespoke Rails platforms at a Portland agency for Disney, Pabst Blue Ribbon and Taco Bell; an agile-management tool at Integral Agile with a real-time collaborative document editor; platform and community work at Within3; a nine-year development, maintenance and hosting contract with The Syndicate; and retail systems at KT Appliance through mid-2026.

I grew up in Hawaii and started young, self-taught. The first paid work was a lead-capture tool for DIRECTV in 2012, written in PHP; Rails arrived the year after and stayed. Around 2020 the harder problems moved to the front end and I moved with them — React, then React Native, Next.js and TypeScript — until I was building the whole product instead of the half of it behind an API. Since July 2026 I have been Chief Technology Officer at Upside Capital Holdings, a multifamily real-estate firm, where that combination is the job: data pipelines, internal tools, and the product suite that sits on top of them.

Nights go lower in the stack: XyEngine, a game engine written from scratch in C++, and a Second Life–compatible virtual-world server in Rust, with Rapier physics, an economy, and its own water and wind. I also write, produce and release music as Earl Balai — R&B, soul and pop, ten singles since December 2024, several of them in Tagalog — on Spotify and Apple Music. I am living in Manila for now, which is where most of those were written. The same instinct runs through all of it: take something complicated, get it to hum, then get out of the way.