Hello Again, World

I've decided to redesign this site after nearly a decade of dormancy — not just for the sake of aesthetics, but as a way to reconnect with my roots and rethink my trajectory.

My original plan was to nerd out about fonts and framework... until I stumbled upon a word that stuck with me: Vestigia — Latin for footprints and traces. It felt like the perfect metaphor for this site, and maybe even for how I've navigated my career.

It hit deeper than expected. So instead of a breakdown of design choices, here’s the story that led me here.

The Beginning

I'm from a small town called Ranau, located somewhere in North Borneo, Malaysia. The local economy runs on agriculture and petroleum. Technology wasn’t part of daily life — computers were rare, and the internet showed up late. (Yeah, it took its sweet time.)

As you can probably guess, design or tech wasn’t part of the plan at all.

My first brush with technology felt... forced. But that involuntary exposure slowly turned into a quiet pull — toward understanding the how behind interfaces, the invisible decisions that make software feel intuitive or frustrating.

Believe it or not, I was a Science major — but I was way more invested in co-curricular activities, and treated studying like a side quest.

The Detour

Let's just say my report card didn't exactly scream “future engineer.” So I settled for an IT degree — not out of passion, but so my parents had something to brag about at weddings.

For our final-year project (you know, the one you need to graduate), my team built a ferry-ticketing system in PHP. The code worked, but the interface felt off. Looking back, that quiet dissatisfaction ended up being my first real step into design.

We barely passed — but hey, a degree's a degree.

The Year of Learning

After graduation, I gave myself one year — not to job-hunt, but to learn design. The only “design” I knew was what I saw online, so I naturally associated it with HTML and CSS. Friends and family thought I'd lost it. I spent most of my days locked in my room with a laptop, books, and a whiteboard.

A few months later (honestly, maybe six or more), I shipped my first website. It was hard-coded in Notepad, far from a masterpiece — but enough to give me the confidence to apply to a local hackathon.

They invited me. By the end of the night, the organizer — who would become my first boss — said, "Hey, do you want to work with us?" Turns out, that hackathon was also a hiring exercise. And that's how I landed my first design job.

Fourteen Years Later

Fast forward to today: I’ve designed across industries — from travel and finance to blockchain and health — shaping products, scaling systems, and hiring design teams in both scrappy startups and structured corporates.

I’m still here, still building, still learning — and, yes, finally learning to code.

What you’ll find here are notes, fragments, and half-figured ideas on design, technology, and the weird joy of figuring things out — a trail of experiments I’ve left behind (and sometimes circled back to). Vestigia, if you will.

As part of that ongoing learning, I decided to code this site from scratch (okay, not entirely from scratch — I used Vite and React). I’ll share a deep dive on that soon. Promise.

That said, email subscriptions still aren’t playing nice with this stack. I’m exploring a few API options (open to suggestions!). In the meantime, feel free to drop me a message at hello@javierlo.com.

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Thanks for visiting my corner of the internet. If any of this resonates, stick around — there's more ahead.