Gian Chill A. Laolao has wanted to pursue tech for as long as he can remember. There was never a moment of figuring it out, just a steady pull toward understanding how computers actually work underneath everything else. That pull followed him into the SBLabs Internship Program, where his refusal to quit pushed him to accomplish more than he expected. But before all that, the same curiosity almost led him down a different path. He considered Computer Engineering at first, but after learning more about what each field actually involved, he realized Computer Science fit him better.
He’s now a 4th-year BS Computer Science student majoring in Software Technology at De La Salle University Manila and a DOST JLSS Scholar. He’s curious, efficient, optimistic, though he’ll also admit he’s mostly introverted until he’s comfortable with the people and environment around him, at which point that reserve tends to disappear.
Gian first encountered programming in high school, through basic logic, Visual Basic, and HTML, the kind of early exposure that plants a seed without you quite realizing it yet. By the time he reached college, that seed had grown into real range: he’s now comfortable across JavaScript, TypeScript, React, Next.js, HTML, CSS, and Tailwind, with additional experience in MongoDB, SQL, Python, Java, C/C++, Firebase, Supabase, and tools like Excel and PowerBI. If you ask which language he’d reach for first, it’s TypeScript, no contest.
His proudest project so far traces back to his thesis, long before Springboard entered the picture. For his thesis, he and his team built and fine-tuned a large language model for machine translation, his first real attempt at LLM fine-tuning from scratch. Getting it to actually work, after all the research and iteration that went into it, gave him a sense of accomplishment he still points back to.
That same hands-on instinct carried into his work at Springboard. Gian was one of the developers behind LEDGR, a full-stack accounting app that manages chart of accounts, journal entries, and BIR-compliant bookkeeping, with OCR-powered receipt extraction built in. He also contributed to CompassDesk, a help-desk backend where AI fields customer support tickets first, escalating to a human agent only when needed.
Operating Systems gave him the most trouble in school, by his own account, there was simply a lot to absorb, with more he still feels he hasn’t fully grasped. His way of learning something new hasn’t changed much since: research first, find tutorials, then apply it through practice almost immediately, rather than waiting until he feels ready.
He treats setbacks the same way. Rather than dwelling on what went wrong, he uses failure as a chance to understand his own weaknesses and figure out what to adjust next time. What keeps him moving when things get hard isn’t ambition exactly, it’s regret, or more precisely, his refusal to let himself give up on something he knows he’d regret quitting later.
I use failure as an opportunity to learn about myself, my weaknesses, and what I could do to prevent such setbacks.
— How Gian’s optimistic nature handles failure
His advice for anyone eyeing a similar path doesn’t stop at tech specifically: make sure you’re genuinely interested in the industry you’re stepping into, whatever it turns out to be. That interest, he believes, is what actually carries you through.
Interested to collaborate with Gian? Know more about him on LinkedIn, GitHub, and his portfolio.
Looking to build real-world tech solutions with emerging talent? Partner with Springboard and turn ideas into working MVPs.
