Hi, I'm JC Diamante

Now I'm working in FinTech as a Lead Software Engineer at GCash with 94 million+ users worldwide. On the side, I'm pursuing my Master's in AI at The University of Texas at Austin, doing ML research on forest fire detection at Mapúa University, and giving tech talks at universities whenever I can.

This was the year everything clicked. I graduated Magna Cum Laude and Silver Medalist from Mapúa University, one of the top CS programs in the Philippines known for its rigorous and fast-paced curriculum.

My thesis on detecting invasive water plants using AI won Best Undergraduate Thesis and was presented in Tokyo, Japan where it also received the Excellent Oral Presentation award.

I joined every hackathon I could find, was active in a lot of student organizations, and got accepted into DOST Project S.P.A.R.T.A, a national data science scholarship limited to 30,000 scholars. During this time, I also dove into the startup world, leading my own NFT project Hidalgo NFT and working as a full-stack developer at SageSoft Solutions and VCreatives PH.

From classroom projects to international conferences, startup leadership to full-stack development — this period proved that hard work and curiosity open doors to unexpected opportunities.

It all started with curiosity and a love for competitions. As a high school student, I was already winning programming contests and building robots, earning titles like IT Wizard and Best in Computer Programming.

At a younger age, I started making my own website when I was 8, learned C++ and Visual Basic at school, and tried exploring Python on my free time building web apps with Django.

These early experiences taught me that showing up and trying is already half the battle.