OJT Training Experience- BUCENG, Laurence Lemuel G. Ayo BSIT 4B

March 20 — Friday Friday Graduation Shoot, a Holiday, and One Last Task Before the Weekend      Today was Eid Al-Fitr, a public holiday, which meant no formal reporting to the office. And as it happened, today was also the day of my graduation photoshoot. So the day had a completely different texture from the rest of the week, we had breaks, no code, no GitHub, no Supabase, just me in a alampay, a suit and wearing happy faces standing in front of a camera trying to look like I have it all figured out.      It was a genuinely nice break. Graduation photos carry a weight that is hard to explain unless you have been working toward a finish line for years and suddenly you are putting on the outfit that represents reaching it. Even in the middle of an OJT, even with a system deadline hanging over my head and hours left to render, today reminded me that there is a bigger milestone waiting on the other side of all of this.        That said, the...

March 19, 2026 Day 19, Keep Breathing       We wrapped up the remaining merge work today and honestly the relief was immediate. Getting all the branches consolidated into one coherent codebase is one of those milestones that does not announce itself loudly, but you feel it. The project went from being several separate things to being one thing, and that shift matters both practically and mentally.      The rest of the day was relatively calm. With the merge done, there was less urgency than there had been Tuesday and Wednesday. We reviewed what we had, noted a few things to revisit once the backend is more developed, and gave ourselves a moment to acknowledge that we had moved the project forward meaningfully this week.      Not much coding happened after the merge was finalized. And I was fine with that. Sometimes the most productive thing you can do after a big push is stop, look at what you built, and let it settle before jumping into...

March 18, 2026 Day 18, Merging Everything      Merge day. Or at least the first of two merge days, because pulling together multiple branches from three different people working on three different parts of the same system is not something you rush through in a single afternoon.      We started the merging process today and it went about as smoothly as you can realistically expect. There were moments where things aligned perfectly and moments where two parts of the code that were written separately suddenly had to figure out how to coexist. Nothing catastrophic, but it required attention and patience and a lot of back and forth between the three of us to make sure we understood what each person had written well enough to resolve the conflicts cleanly.      I think the fact that we had been in constant communication throughout the week helped a lot. Because we had been checking in with each other about our progress and our approach, the merge d...

March 17, 2026  Tuesday, The Final Frontend Git Push      Today was one of those days where you put your head down and do not lift it until the work is done. We made the final frontend push today, every detail from the design board we made are needed to be implemented before we could confidently say the frontend was ready to be merged. It was time consuming, sometimes tedious, and a keyboard exercise.      There is a particular kind of pressure that comes with knowing you are on the last stretch of a phase. You want to make sure you are not leaving anything unfinished, red lines for the next person to deal with. Every loose end you leave in your branch is a potential headache during the merge, and nobody wants to be the reason a merge turns into a debugging session. So today I was careful with what I put in. Checking things as they are before moving on.      By the end of the day, the frontend was in a state I felt good about. Not perfec...

March 16, 2026 Another Monday, Backend Begins      Monday came with a clear agenda. After spending most of last week grinding through the frontend tasks and getting our individual branches into shape, today marked the start of something new, the backend. We finally began the initial setup of our backend using "Supabase", and just getting that foundation laid felt like another gear shifting in the project.      Setting up Supabase for the first time in an actual project is different from just reading about it. You have to think about how your data is going to be structured, how the tables relate to each other, and what the system is actually going to need to store and retrieve in real use. We did not finish everything today, this was more of an initial creation, getting the project configured, the connection established, and the first ideas about our database structure sketched out. The real table building would come later in the week.      It...

March 13,2026 Work From Home and a Week Worth Reflecting On      Today was a work from home day. The reason behind it is something bigger than just office logistics oil prices have been rising sharply, and with the foreign conflicts ongoing in different parts of the world, the economic pressure is being felt here too. People are cutting commutes where they can, and today the school made the call for us to stay home. I understand it. The world outside this OJT is still happening whether or not I am thinking about it.      Working from home is a different experience from being in the office. There is no biometrics to worry about, no printer running in the background, no hallway conversations. Just me, my laptop, and the tasks I had already committed to finishing this week. I used the day to continue working on my GitHub assignments and tying up any loose ends before the grand merge we have planned for next week. I wanted to make sure that when Monday comes an...

March 12 — Thursday Two Weeks In and Still Going      Two weeks into the OJT and I find myself taking stock of where things stand. The coding phase has started. The GitHub tasks are moving. The team is functioning well. The biometrics at the guardhouse is slowly becoming less of a personal challenges I got both logs right today, which feels like a small but meaningful win.      Work today was more of the same in the best way. I continued pushing through my assigned tasks, making sure the code I was writing was clean enough that when we merge everything next week it would not cause unnecessary headaches for the rest of the team. I also took some time to review what others had been working on just to stay familiar with the overall shape of the system, because when the merge happens, everyone needs to understand the full picture, not just their own corner of it.      Something I have been sitting with lately is a thought that crept up on me some...

March 11, 2026 Day 13  Heads Down, Writing Code      No big events today. Just work. And honestly, that is exactly what this phase of the project calls for. I spent most of the day focused on my assigned tasks in the codebase, working through the parts delegated to me and making sure I understood what I was building well enough to actually build it correctly, not just quickly.      There is a particular kind of focus that comes with coding that I find both exhausting and satisfying. You can spend an hour on something that ends up being ten lines of working code, and another ten minutes on something that somehow breaks everything else. Today had a bit of both. I hit a few walls, worked through them, and ended the day with more done than I started with. That is all you can really ask for.      The team is in a good rhythm right now. We are each in our own lane, working through our assigned GitHub tasks, but we still check in with each othe...

March 10, 2026 Day 12 — First Day of the Coding Phase        There is something that feels different about a day when you finally stop designing and start building. Today was that day. We officially entered the coding phase of the Document Management System, and even just starting setting up the environment, laying down the initial structure, writing the first few lines, felt like a significant shift in the project's energy.      We spent a portion of the day planning how to divide the work among the three of us. Since we are a small team working on a real system with a real deadline, coordination matters more than it would in a school project. We agreed on dividing the tasks into smaller units, assigning each one on GitHub, and setting internal deadlines so that everything converges in a grand merge next week when each piece is supposed to come together. It is a simple enough plan on paper, but the execution will depend on how disciplined we each are ...

 March 9, 2026  Day 11 — We Did It. They Loved It.      I walked into this Monday with a quiet kind of nervousness. We had spent the better part of last week reworking the design, addressing every comment from the first presentation, and making sure that when we stood in front of the Engineering Department again, we had something genuinely better to show. And today, we finally got to find out if all that effort paid off. It did.      The second presentation of the DMS design went better than I could have hoped. Our client, the Engineering Department responded well to everything. The adjustments we made based on their feedback landed exactly the way we intended. The features we incorporated, the ones we were a little unsure about adding, turned out to be the ones they appreciated most. There was a moment during the presentation where I could feel the energy in the room shift from evaluation mode to genuine interest, and that shift meant everything....

 March 6, 2026 Day 10 : No Power, No Laptops, and a Surprisingly Peaceful Morning      Today threw us a curveball. Around the morning, there was a power disruption on campus caused by a transformer issue, and just like that, no electricity, no laptops, no printer, no screens. The entire rhythm of the day just stopped.      At first I did not know what to do with myself. My instinct was to find something productive, but without power there was very little that could be done in the traditional sense. So the three of us just ended up talking, sitting around, and honestly having one of the more relaxed mornings of this entire OJT so far. We talked about the project, about school, about what we were hoping to get out of this whole experience. It was the kind of conversation you do not usually make time for when you are busy staring at a screen.      I will not pretend it was the most productive day on paper. It was not. But sometimes you ...

 March 5,2026 Day 9 — Revisions in Progress and Getting Closer      We were heads down on revisions all day today. The new design changes are coming together slowly but the direction feels right. We are addressing the comments from Liera, madam's secretary with them one by one, and every resolved item feels like a small victory. The team dynamic has also been really solid lately. Maybe the delicious pancit from the canteen has redbull, the three of us, my fellow OJT students and I  have genuinely started to flow as a group. What started as three people who barely knew each other thrown into the same project has slowly turned into something that feels like an actual team. We joke around during breaks, help each other when someone is stuck, and check in on each other's progress without being asked.      It is one of the unexpected parts of OJT that nobody really warns you about which is that you might actually make real friends in the process. Th...

 March 4, 2026 Day 8, Back to Designing and Learning How DTR Works      The day after a presentation is always a bit of a reset. We spent most of today going through the feedback from the Engineering Department point by point and figuring out which parts needed minor adjustments and which needed a more significant redesign. It is actually a more difficult task than designing from scratch in some ways, because you have to balance the original design intent with the new requirements that came out of the feedback session.      We divided the comments into two categories, the quick fixes that we could handle in a day or two, and more involved changes that would require rethinking certain modules. The goal is to have everything updated and ready to present again by Monday, March 9. That gives us just a few days to turn things around, which is tight but doable if we stay focused.      On a completely different note, today I also learned ab...

  March 3,2026 Day 7 where we Presented Design 1.0 and the Feedback Was Honest      Today was the day. We finally presented Design 1.0 of the Document Management System to the Engineering Department, and I will say this standing in front of the Dean, with her secretary and walking them through something you designed yourself is a completely different experience from a classroom demo. These are the actual people who are going to use the system. Their questions are not hypothetical. Their concerns are real.      Overall, the presentation went smoothly in terms of delivery. We were able to explain the layout, the intended user flow, and the core features we had designed. But as expected with any first design, there were comments. Several, actually. Some were minor — wording choices, button placement, the way certain forms were structured. Others were a bit more substantial and made us rethink a few screens entirely. The department has specific workflow...

 March 2, 2026 Day 6       Technically today felt like not an OJT day, but my mind did not seem to get the memo. I kept thinking about the presentation coming up and whether our Design 1.0 of the DMS was ready. We had been putting it together with the intention of presenting it to the Engineering Department, and the closer the date got, the more I found myself mentally reviewing every screen, every flow, every label we chose.      I used part of the day to go over our design one more time on my own — not to redo anything, just to be familiar enough with it that I could speak confidently about each part if asked. Presentations are not just about the slides or the mockups. They are about being able to defend your decisions and admit clearly when something still needs work. That is the part that makes me a little nervous, honestly. We put real thought into Design 1.0, but we know it is not perfect. No first design ever is. I just hope the feedback...

  February 27 ,2026 Day 5 — Wrapping Up the Week Before the Big Presentation      It is hard to believe we are already five days into our OJT. The days have been going by faster than I expected, and today was no different. Most of what we did revolved around finalizing preparations for our upcoming design presentation of the Document Management System, or DMS, that we are building for the Engineering Department. A lot of the afternoon was spent reviewing the design mockups we had been putting together over the past few days, making sure everything looked presentable and that we could actually explain our design decisions clearly once we were in front of the department.      Aside from the presentation prep, I also spent some time at the office helping out with smaller tasks — the usual stuff like assisting with document requests and making myself useful around the MIS area. Nothing too demanding, which honestly gave me more mental space to think about ...

Feb. 26,2026 "Making Myself Useful on Day 4" Another morning, another day log at the logbook while were not registered at Bicol University East Campus yet. Day 4 of my On-the-Job Training and honestly, today was one of those quieter, steadier days where the work isn't bright, but the feeling of genuinely contributed something. No dramatic system crashes, no major deployments. Just a normal student intern doing what needs to be done. Organizing professors' documents, a pile of faculty paperwork that had been sitting in a stack, some forms, mountains of submitted theses, printed memos, and endorsement letters that needed to be sorted, filed, and cross-referenced. It sounds simple, but with many involved, you have to be careful not to mix anything up. I sorted them as I were told to do, then placed them in the proper folders. Printing faculty documents were second, few professors came by needing things printed, some forms, a couple of certifications, and refe...