I am not a developer. I am the person who used to need one.

My name is Nguyễn Trần Tiến Phúc — Lucas. I am 23, I live in Đà Nẵng, and four months ago I had never opened a code editor. Today a clothing shop runs its entire day on software I built. This is how that happened — the real version, not the interview version.

I learned to handle people before I learned to handle code

My first job was carrying plates. I was a waiter at Bonpas Bakery, right after I started university. It taught me the things school never did — how to talk to a stranger who is upset, how to stay calm when three tables need you at once, how to actually solve a problem for a person instead of apologising at them.

Then came Novotel Premier Han River, one of the first five-star hotels in Đà Nẵng. I worked front office — concierge, bellman, the person who opens the door. A hundred-plus guests a day, from everywhere in the world, ninety percent of them leaving happy. I learned to listen for what someone actually needs, not what they say. That skill has carried me through every single thing since.

I hate seeing people stare at their phones

I'd go out with friends and everyone would just be on their phone. I wanted a reason for people to actually talk to each other again.

So I started a boardgame community. Not joined one — started one. DN Boardgame COM, built for students. We host games that make people negotiate, lie, debate, cooperate. We run them in Vietnamese and English, so locals and foreigners both show up and practise each other's language. We run workshops on money, insurance, getting into university, finding the job that fits you. It grew to around nine hundred people.

That was the first time I built something from nothing and watched it become bigger than me. I did not know it yet, but it was the pattern for everything after.

The event years

Through university I collected the experiences that teach you how things actually run: Google Developer Student Club (started as a member, ended up leading media and events); Draper Startup House, volunteering under a mentor named Aaron who had built and lost a big company and had things to teach; Da Nang Goat, managing volunteers at an orphanage for a year; DNES, the government-backed incubator, where I learned the unglamorous paperwork side of how Vietnamese businesses start; ALE English, teaching kids and watching them stop being afraid of the language.

And then Wildcats. I came in as an event intern. I moved to operations, then community, and now I run projects. Forty-plus events. Teams of five to ten. Bilingual, every time.

The night that changed it

The project I am most proud of: a group of nearly a hundred students flew in from the United States. Wildcats was the bridge between their university and mine. I owned the whole thing — a networking session across both schools, and a hackathon where we mixed the students together to build something real for the community. I was the main host. It was the first time I felt like a leader, not a helper.

Somewhere in that room I realised I wanted to build the things I was only organising other people to build.

Then AI happened

In April 2026 I opened a code editor for the first time. I had no computer-science background. What I had was AI that could write code, and a head full of business problems I had been collecting for years. I am what people now call a vibe coder — except I take it seriously. In 104 days I made 839 commits. A clothing shop in Đà Nẵng now runs 6,874 customers and 4,076 orders through something I built. I cut the time to open a customer profile from 18 seconds to under one. I repaired 3,252 corrupted records without losing a single row.

The advantage was never the code. The advantage was that I had spent three years being the client. I ask the questions a business owner asks, because I was one. Then I build the answer.

What I am not

I am not a true developer, and I will not pretend to be one. I am a generalist. I take a messy problem, find the real problem underneath it, use AI to build a solution, and ship it. That is the whole pitch. If you need a senior engineer, I am not your person. If you need someone who will actually understand your business and hand you working software, I might be exactly your person.

Đà Nẵng, Việt Nam · Vietnamese & English · IELTS 7.5 · always happier with a boardgame on the table.