About
I'm Victor — a software engineer who builds things for the web and spends most of his free time chasing competitive hobbies. I like problems that sit at the intersection of engineering and something I genuinely care about, which is how most of my side projects start: I get curious, then I start building.
Volleyball
I started playing volleyball in college and was instantly hooked. I spent a lot of my free time either watching film, studying technique, or lifting weights with improving my vertical jump in mind. My main infatuation with the sport was being able to feel and see myself leveling up in real time. In order to keep improving, I joined the Men's Club Volleyball team, where we competed in tournaments against other Collegiate Clubs all across the nation. Nowadays, I am more recreational — my focus has shifted from self-improvement to the people-aspect, where volleyball being such a team-oriented sport has allowed me to develop life-long friendships and community.
Teamfight Tactics
I starting playing TFT recreationally a couple of years ago, but just recently started playing it more competitively. I was recently able to hit the highest rank, Challenger, meaning I was ranked top 250 in the North American leaderboard. It's one of those games that rewards pattern recognition, adaptability, and knowing when to pivot, which is probably why I got hooked. The meta shifts constantly, and keeping up with it required skill in itself — much like keeping up to date with the current technology landscape. The constant shifts in the meta actually what led me to build TFT Meta Mind — a RAG-powered chatbot that pulls from daily-updated game data so I could query comp strengths, item priorities, and meta trends conversationally. The hobby turned into an engineering project, and I learned a lot about data pipelines and retrieval-augmented generation along the way.
Violin
I picked up the violin when I was 11, and it ended up being one of the biggest influences on how I approach everything else. Practicing one to two hours a day taught me more about discipline than anything else in my life — it was less about wanting to practice and more about just showing up every day regardless. It also taught me how to break down complexity — when you're stuck on a hard passage, you isolate it, slow it down, and work through it piece by piece until it clicks. Beyond the instrument itself, orchestra gave me a community and some of my closest friendships. We traveled to DC and London to perform, which were experiences I still think about often. In high school, I managed to make the Texas All-state orchestra, which felt like all those hours finally paying off. During my freshman year at UT, I joined the University Orchestra for non-music majors, but sadly, due to covid, my time was cut short and I stopped playing as much. However, building Suzuki Intonation Trainer was a fun way to sharpen my technical skills while reconnecting with something I grew up with.
