1. Honorable Discharge and a Fierce Twenties In 2005, after successfully completing my mandatory military service in the Republic of Korea Army, I was faced with the harsh reality of life. As a Seoul native, my twenties were a fierce series of survival. I worked as a security guard at Citibank, then transitioned into personal loan sales, experiencing both the bitter and sweet tastes of society. I endured with the patience and responsibility I learned in the military, but I always had a thirst for a ‘different world.’
2. The Unplanned Flight to Davao (2010) Then, while taking on some background acting gigs, I met an older friend who sparked my yearning for a “life working in English.” As I was preparing for a working holiday in Australia, my younger sister told me about a ‘work-study’ opportunity at a video English tutoring company through an acquaintance of hers. Seeing that I could study English and work at the same time, I had a brief meeting in Korea and immediately boarded a flight to the unfamiliar land of Davao, Philippines.
3. The Vast Gap Between Seoul and Davao Life in Davao was relaxed, and the people were kind, but objectively speaking, the infrastructure was incomparably underdeveloped compared to Seoul. Living here for 16 years, whenever I visited Seoul for my annual vacation, seeing my rapidly developing home country often gave me a chilling sense of anxiety: “Am I the only one falling behind here?”
4. Anxiety Leading to the World of AI, and Desperate Struggles That anxiety pushed me into the world of IT and technology. When news about ChatGPT and AI was pouring out two years ago, I thought it had nothing to do with me. But after reading an article about building a personal AI assistant using ‘OpenClaw’, I dove in headfirst. The process was brutal. I tasted countless failures trying to integrate a local LLM, ‘Ollama’, and though I barely succeeded using the grit I learned in the military, I was frustrated by its sub-par performance. However, I didn’t give up. Moving through GPT-4o-mini and finally meeting Gemini, my eyes were opened to the new world of ‘Automation Systems.’
5. Breaking Limits: Building the Automation Engine Building automations with Gemini was also filled with errors and failures. But the moment I refined the system and upgraded the AI model, a completely different level of results began to emerge. I realized that while I might not be able to catch up with the physical development speed of Seoul, I could lead faster than anyone else in the digital world, armed with AI and automation.
6. The Next Goal: Connection Beyond Limits Currently, alongside this archive, I am simultaneously building a massive ‘automation pipeline’, including my first automation blog and multiple YouTube Shorts channels. My next short-term goal is to generate stable revenue through these systems so I can converse at a deep-learning level with the top-tier AI model (Ultra).
Quietly recording the essence amidst the noise of the world, I will leave all my technical thoughts, trials and errors, and my life in Davao right here in “Kevin’s Archive.”