The latest articles on DEV Community by Justine Lopez (@justpres). https://dev.to/justpres https://media2.dev.to/dynamic/image/width=90,height=90,fit=cover,gravity=auto,format=auto/https:%2F%2Fdev-to-uploads.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com%2Fuploads%2Fuser%2Fprofile_image%2F4069548%2F1b2d649f-8713-49f1-a06b-deda029b7d55.jpg https://dev.to/justpres en Justine Lopez Sun, 09 Aug 2026 11:56:11 +0000 https://dev.to/justpres/things-i-built-while-figuring-out-what-kind-of-engineer-i-want-to-become-1j4j https://dev.to/justpres/things-i-built-while-figuring-out-what-kind-of-engineer-i-want-to-become-1j4j <h2> I Don't Want to Be Known for Knowing Technologies </h2> <p>I've been thinking about something recently.</p> <p>As an IT student, it's easy to look at what other developers are doing and feel like you need to know everything.</p> <p>React.</p> <p>Next.js.</p> <p>Flutter.</p> <p>Kotlin.</p> <p>AI.</p> <p>IoT.</p> <p>Cloud.</p> <p>Databases.</p> <p>And then another framework appears.</p> <p>So I started asking myself a different question:</p> <p><strong>What do I actually want people to remember me for?</strong></p> <p>I don't have a perfect answer yet.</p> <p>But I think my projects are starting to give me one.</p> <p>I'm calling this series <strong>"Things I Built While Figuring Out What Kind of Engineer I Want to Become."</strong></p> <h2> 1. subukAn: The Project I Haven't Built Yet </h2> <p>This might sound like a strange project to start with.</p> <p>I haven't actually built the application.</p> <p>And that's intentional.</p> <p>subukAn is my idea for a user-testing platform for the Filipino tech community.</p> <p>The idea is that developers can pay real testers to evaluate their applications against specific tasks, while testers earn money for completing those tasks.</p> <p>My first instinct was to build it.</p> <p>Then I stopped.</p> <p>I realized I could spend weeks building authentication, dashboards, payments, databases and APIs without knowing whether the basic idea worked.</p> <p>So version 0.1 is currently a planning and validation phase.</p> <p>I'm trying to answer questions before writing the code.</p> <p>Would developers pay for this?</p> <p>Would testers participate?</p> <p>How should tasks be priced?</p> <p>What happens when a tester rejects a task?</p> <p>How should disputes work?</p> <p>That's probably one of the most useful things I've learned recently:</p> <p><strong>Coding isn't always the first step.</strong></p> <p>Sometimes the first step is finding out what you don't know.</p> programming webdev android buildinpublic