Gerard Vito “Troy” J. Belardo treats personal growth almost like a game: every new skill learned, every habit built, is another level gained. That mindset has shaped how he approaches fitness, his studies, and now his work as an intern at Springboard.
A 4th-year BS Computer Science student majoring in Software Technology at De La Salle University and a DOST-MERIT Scholar, Troy almost took a different path entirely. Game development was his first love, but after weighing the risks against the realities of the industry, he chose Software Technology instead, a decision he calls a balance between passion and practicality. He hasn’t ruled out circling back to game dev once he’s built more experience, but for now, he’s found his own kind of satisfaction in software development: solving problems and seeing the results immediately.
Troy’s relationship with code goes back further than most. He was navigating computers and mobile devices by grade school, picked up scattered programming concepts in high school, and only really started building in college. Today, he works comfortably across Python, Java, JavaScript, TypeScript, Kotlin, and Ruby, with hands-on experience in React.js, Express.js, and REST API development.
One project still stands out to him: D-Enroll, a distributed enrollment management system he and his team built for their Distributed Computing class. He handled the front-end, wiring up the views to backend services so data moved cleanly through the system. What he remembers most isn’t the code, it’s how well the team worked together, with clear roles and strong communication carrying the project from start to finish.
At Springboard, that same collaborative instinct followed him into production work. Troy built HopSpring, a Discord bot that uses RAG and LLM-powered summarization to let teams chat with their own channel history, pull on-demand summaries, and receive recurring digests, all without leaving Discord. He’s also one of the intern developers of CompassDesk, a help-desk backend where AI handles support tickets first and hands off to a human agent when needed, and LEDGR, a full-stack accounting app with built-in BIR-compliant bookkeeping and OCR-powered receipt extraction.
Operating Systems and Distributed Computing were the concepts that pushed him hardest in school, by his own admission, the ones he really had to dial in for. That same patience shows in how he learns now: breaking things down through imagery and analogies, taking organized notes, and leaning on AI tools when they genuinely help him understand something faster.
Prepare your skills as much as you can, whether through school or self-learning. Make sure your resume reflects what you can actually do, and try to have at least one solid project you can talk about. Most importantly, be confident in your skills and be willing to learn.
— Troy’s advice to aspiring Springboard interns
Get to know more about Troy by visiting his LinkedIn, GitHub, and portfolio.
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