About
I was doing the work before I was building the software for it.
I'm Michael Rhey Palaganas, a full-stack developer and automation engineer in Pangasinan, Philippines. I started in digital marketing and media buying, running campaigns across ad platforms and dashboards.
That's where the pattern became obvious: businesses running on people copying data between systems by hand. So I went back to school for Computer Engineering to build the fix instead of requesting it.
Most of what I build now is work I once did myself, which is why I start with how it really gets done.
The path
Operator, then automation, then software.
- Stage 1
Operator
Digital marketing and media buying: campaign setups, reports, and handoffs, done by hand, every day.
- Stage 2
Automation
Started wiring the repetitive parts together. Lead pipelines, syncs, and reports that run on their own.
- Stage 3
Software engineering
A BS in Computer Engineering (Embedded Systems), then full-stack products, internal tools, and mobile builds.
What it changes
Having run the process changes what I build first.
Start with the real workflow
How the work actually happens, including the workarounds, not how the SOP says it should.
Build the smallest real version
Working software shown early, on real data, instead of a big reveal at the end.
Design for the ugly cases
The edge case in a webhook payload, the one dirty row that breaks a sync, the approval that never comes back. That's where systems fail in production.
Keep a person where judgment matters
Automation drafts, sorts, and routes. A human still approves the calls that shouldn't be guessed.
Current focus
- Full-stack and automation work for an entertainment company, under contract.
- Open to full-time roles and select contract work.
Experience
Where the work has been.
2026 – Present
Full-Stack Developer & Automation
Entertainment company (independent contract)
- An end-to-end e-signature system: custom dashboard, workflow, and tracking, built from scratch.
- A real-time, multi-platform monitoring pipeline that classifies brand mentions with GPT-4o-mini.
- A full mobile match-3 game in Flutter, with a custom ability and audio system.
Impact
- Manual NDA handling replaced
- Manual social listening eliminated
May – Jul 2026
Backend Engineer Intern
OpenSesame.PH
- A 3-month internship on the server side of the stack: APIs, data modeling, and infrastructure, alongside the client work above.
2025
Automation & Integration
Qyxera Digital Marketing Solutions (formerly Virtual Rocket, LLC)
- Enrichify, an email enrichment tool, shipped to production on Azure with full CI/CD.
- A Typeform-to-CRM lead pipeline for client onboarding.
Impact
- Free alternative to $200+/month enrichment tools
- Manual data entry removed from onboarding
2025
Automation & Prompt Engineer
Project Job Hunt
- A parallelized document pipeline with Make.com and the OpenAI API.
Impact
- 30% fewer output errors than sequential processing