Learn from new experiences, and learn how to use that as your strength. Be the main actor for your life.

James Paguia, 2023

I’d like to acknowledge James, who passed away in a car crash, along with his brother-in-law, Jos, and his niece, Nat-nat, on November 26th of last year. James was as much of a computer nerd as I was, and he inspired me to continue following my own passions and to believe in myself. He was the closest I’ll ever have to a best friend, something I've never really had for a long while.

This has had a huge impact on my life ever since, especially since James, his brother, my brother, and I had shared our own plans in the future, and the things we would do in our adulthood. As much as I wish they were still alive, I’m grateful for them to have been part of my life, even if it was such a short time in the grand scheme of things.

R.I.P.

Hoping spectator mode treats y'all well.

My Family

Ma & Pa

As imperfect as my parents can be (and as old-school as they can be in religious faith), I respect them for bringing me and our family into where we are now. We may not be very wealthy; we’re still broke as heck, but at least my brother and I have the opportunities to better provide for ourselves, our family, and the families back home in the Philippines.

My mom makes great Sinigang, a Filipino soup with pork, various vegetables, and okra. My dad is into basketball, and watches a lot of NBA in his pastime. They both have similar jobs, and work in the same hotel, and they were born in the same year; 1971. They’re not great parents on the surface, but they’ve sacrificed a lot for our family to live in Canada, and I’m thankful for that.

Kuya Aeron (Pits)

Kuya Aeron, also known as Pits in his friend group, is, well, my brother. He’s the one responsible for the majority of my music tastes, and he’s pretty extroverted. He’d go down to Vancouver, and go clubbing with his friends there on a weekend. We’d often joke about how we’re from different sides of the same coin, as we have polarizing personalities, hobbies, et cetera, and yet we share most of the same values in life, and how we both suck at finding romantic relationships. Currently, he works as an insurance person in the village, though he plans to continue his IT career when he and I move to Vancouver next year, given that he has completed his CIT diploma at BCIT.

Having seen his struggles in the past few years, and more so with the passing of his cousin James, I wish for the best for what he needs to do to pick himself back up, and become the person he wishes to be.

My Friends & Community

My Hobbies & Passions

Programming

pygame Maze Game

made in Python 3.8.12, and pygame library

My Growth as a Programmer

My love for computers and programming started with a great interest in playing video games. Growing up, I played lots of Tetris, Minecraft, Roblox, and a wide variety of Adobe Flash games on the old Vaio laptop. I’ve always imagined creating my own video game, though I never understood how it was possible to make one, nor how computers worked in the first place, until I became exposed to programming with Roblox Studio when I was 10-ish years old. It was a piece of software where you create games for the platform, with tools to create 3D spaces and add functionality with Lua, a scripting language.

My first project with Studio was a racing game. I learned by watching tutorials on YouTube, and by reading Studio’s documentation, though my reading comprehension wasn't great back then. More importantly, I learned by writing the code on my own and experimenting with what works and what doesn’t. I’ve long lost my project file ever since, and I’m sure many of the scripts I wrote were messy and very amateur. The experiences I got from creating the game, and the knowledge and satisfaction I got from solving problems continued my interest in programming, even with the frustrations involved in the process.

Looking back, I’m thankful to own a laptop at a young age. I didn’t grow up to become an iPad kid, as the technology I was exposed to was more experimentative, and freeing, like the Vaio laptop. It has certainly defined my passions and hobbies in general, and my values in right to repair.

Eventually, I began to learn other programming languages and disciplines. I’m most fluent with the Python language, and I’ve used it to make multiple arcade games. One of which was a stacking game, where you have to place blocks evenly all the way up to the top. I developed a gravity game with GameMaker, a dedicated 2D game engine, to learn the concepts of game development, as well as a maze game using the pygame graphics library. Currently, I’m learning web development, so that I can create a portfolio with a nice UI for my capstone project. I plan to explore other areas of software development, and I’d love to get into hardware design, and making circuit boards, someday.

Video Games

Graphic Design

C#t Design

made with love and passion by Samuel Pita

City/Urban Planning

Where I've been

Web Development, & sammuu.dev

Core Competencies

samuelpita/test-project

GitHub repository for sammuu.dev

Initial Steps

For my capstone, I’ve decided to learn web development, and make a website for my portfolio. When I began this project, I learned very quickly that there are many ways to make a website programmatically, as there were lots of client-side JavaScript frameworks, server-side technologies, and cloud services to choose from. Of course, there are many things a website can do, and there are technologies out there that can cater to the needs and goals to develop various types of websites. For my case, I didn’t need to learn or understand most of them, thankfully. My website only needs to look good, have text and images, as well as animation and transitions for visual elements.

My tech stack for my website consists of only three things: SvelteKit, Tailwind, and Cloudflare Pages. I chose SvelteKit because I found it easier to read and write code with, and it has everything you need to make a website. It even has back-end functionalities as well, if I ever need to introduce the ability to post blogs, or do user logins, for example. I chose Tailwind, as I found it much easier to use in designing the look of the website. I’ve also considered putting in a Python interpreter, so I can run my Python & PyGame projects on my website, though I haven’t gotten the time to figure that out. For now, I’ll just link those projects via. Replit. Lastly, I chose Cloudflare for running the website. I’m paying around $10/year for the domain, and $0 to host the website, since there aren’t any moving parts going around in my website, besides the UI.

The Process

Making sammuu.dev was a pain in the a**. In the first few months of the project, I had to experiment a lot with the SvelteKit framework to see what works, figuring out how to organize the project, which folders to put certain files in, as well as the usual struggles of the Document-Object Model, and CSS. There weren’t any sections in SvelteKit’s documentation showing any “best practices” in building your SvelteKit project, and in the months before May, I’ve pretty much been putting images in the wrong folder, and my HTML code had super wrong semantics, as it was all div’s everywhere in my +page.svelte files. HTML Semantics is important, largely due to code readability, and for accessibility, as there will be people who will look at your website with a braille display, or with a voice reader.

Proper Semantics

V.S.

div Spam

Highlights

CSS is gay; use Tailwind if you hate putting in effort.
Use of single-file components in SvelteKit resulting in less code on +page.svelte (aka. Abstraction in programming terms)
My most used command:

git reset --hard
It's a good habit to create a different branch, if you know you might mess up. Make sure the tree is clean, though.

git checkout -b exp4
Emmet (a plugin in Visual Studio Code) is super powerful for writing HTML code.

Frame[layout="flex flex-col items-center"]>section.w-full*3 <Frame layout="flex flex-col items-center"> <section class="w-full"></ section> <section class="w-full"></ section> <section class="w-full"></ section>
F**k Apple (seriously). Safari does not support transparent video for .webm files, and HEIC support is non-existent across many web browsers. The biggest hurdle is converting images from my phone to .jpeg so that it can be displayed.

Final Words

So far, I’m still not as done as I would like with my website. There are a lot of things I still want to add to it, like video players, navigation bars to jump to a specific section in a webpage, and the ability to run python files to display my programming projects, but I’m proud to be able to do this at all. I think I’ve developed a level of respect for front-end web developers for being able to deal with the things I’ve experienced in making sammuu.dev, though I’d feel James would roll on his grave if he ever heard that from me, given how ridiculous technologies designed for websites progresses way too much.

Church Pianist, & the Worship Team

Core Competencies

Where I'm going

So far, I’m still uncertain about how I’ll get through in the months to come. I’ve been considering taking a gap year, but after having talked a lot with different people, and after having conversations with my family, I’ve decided to pursue my current plans of going to BCIT, and do a computer studies diploma. I think the priority for the next few years is making sure my parents don’t have to work anymore, and more importantly, take opportunities that involve traveling outside of Canada. I’ve always wanted to visit Europe, and I’d love to explore more of my home country. I hope that in the years to come, I continue to change, and grow as a human being, and finally, continue to appreciate the little things in life, and be optimistic in the face of anxiety, and the uncertainties of the future.

Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.

Matthew 6:34, NIV