Erick Manrique
I taught myself to code because I wanted to work somewhere like NASA and couldn’t see a path through a degree I wasn’t going to get. First commit: March 4, 2021. At the time the only thing on my résumé was bussing tables and running a kitchen.
From there: a General Assembly immersive (400+ hours), teaching full-stack back at GA, freelance engineering, DevOps, then JPMorgan — associate engineer to VP of Product Management in about four years, no CS degree. I built the frontend of an onboarding platform as an engineer; it’s the API platform, a system of record for 10+ internal apps, whose roadmap I’d later own as a PM. Build the thing, then own the thing. In parallel I ran Bootcampr for three and a half years and closed it honestly when the math didn’t work.
By 998 commits I’d stopped counting the impostor feeling. By 1,012 I had a milestone post about it. The arc is the credential — I don’t apologize for the path; it’s the argument.
I default to building things to understand them. I read the codebase, write code when it’s needed, and ship without a handoff. These days that means working through an agent fleet — Cursor, Claude Code, custom MCP tooling — and adopting AI-PM tooling like Product Faculty’s PM-Copilot framework (I ran its /discover flow against my own product and populated the memory layer). Tools I reach for: Cursor · Claude API · MCP · React/TS · Python · Postgres/pgvector.
The longer arc points at space and aerospace — reached deliberately, by building depth in software, then product, then AI. I mention it rarely; it carries more weight that way.