Ase Morales
Full-stack Developer & Software Engineer
Building systems that put people first
Philosophy: Why I build things
"Made with ❤️" should mean more than passion.
If you search "Made with ❤️", you'll get 30 million+ hits. It's a relic from early Web 2.0.
Early Web 2.0 was digital anarchy with a heartbeat: unsustainable but alive.
It meant nerds staying up late, eating pizza, coding weird little things for the hell of it. I was 14 then, learning C++ from 1990s library books. People made Flash games and funny Twitter bots. APIs were free. There were giants, but not monopolies. The web was built with duct tape and dreams.
Now, it's a strip mine with a paywall, ads, and KPIs hyper-optimized to Goodhart's Law.
Now tech is synonymous with monopolies, data theft, and Silicon Valley snake oil. Bots are equated with automated spam calls and phishing. We finally found ways to sustain the costs of tech, but at the cost of hindering users. Enshittification is
the great heat death of the Internet.
Code doesn't live in Git repositories.
It lives in servers draining rivers, minerals mined by laborers, and upkeep costs. Code is born into the same systems as us, but it's been abstracted away from social responsibility. But the beauty of entropy is that even though all systems break eventually, we find ways to reinvent them.
We need tech that remembers it's for people.
The industry needs ways to fund innovation without bleeding users dry. Hopefully this is just the trough of the hype cycle, moving towards a more sustainable, socially conscious tech industry. Maybe we had to break things to learn how to build them right.
For that we need compassion. Passion builds things, but compassion builds things that matter.
“Made with ❤️” shouldn’t just mean I cared about making it.
It should mean I cared about you.
Journey: From robotics to development
Hi, I'm Ase!
Ase discovered a love for coding at 14 through high school robotics.
Despite limited resources as part of a public school, Ase realized that all competitors relied on the default sumobot program. With self-taught C++ from 1990s library books, Ase wrote a program to outsmart stronger robots, earning the team's 1st international sumobot victory.
Ase then shared this program to their team and graduated leadership awardee for heading the team as they won 10+ international awards within two years.
Later, Ase became the 1st Filipino to win Google Code-in and was awarded for open-source development in Catrobat, a non-profit advocating for poverty alleviation through tech education. This journey led to being featured on national news and a trip to Google in 2018.
Passionate about uplifting lives through technology, Ase has given tech talks, led as head artist for a grassroots organization, published research on machine learning & AI for cancer detection in underfunded hospitals as an undergraduate, and was awarded as the top Computer Science student at the top-ranked Philippines university in 2024.
Outside tech, Ase enjoys sewing clothes for their 20+ year-old stuffed bear named Polar and spoiling the neighborhood cat who keeps following them home for food and headpats.