Linus spent his early childhood in New Jersey before his family moved to the Philippines because of his father’s business ventures. Growing up between the United States and the Philippines gave him a complicated but comfortable sense of home. New Jersey remained familiar through his mother’s continued connection to her family there, while the Philippines became where Linus spent most of his formative years. His younger sister, Eli, shared much of this experience, often accompanying their mother on trips back to New Jersey while Linus became increasingly rooted in the Philippines. Though they grew up in similar surroundings, the two developed in different directions: Eli gravitated toward culture and the arts, while Linus became fascinated by machines.

From an early age, Linus had a habit of taking things apart simply to understand how they worked. Radios, broken toys, remote controls, small appliances, motors, gears, and anything else he could get his hands on eventually found their way onto whatever surface he had available. He was not always able to put everything back together, and some experiments ended with missing screws, broken parts, and irritated adults. That rarely stopped him. If anything, a failed experiment usually left him more determined to figure out what went wrong. Over time, he moved from dismantling things to building and modifying them, becoming less interested in simply making something work and more interested in understanding why it worked.

As he grew older, he began combining mechanics with electronics, sensors, microcontrollers, and software. He was especially drawn to machines that could sense their surroundings, respond to changes, and make decisions on their own. By the time he reached university, what had started as childhood curiosity had developed into a genuine interest in robotics and autonomous systems.

At De La Salle University, Linus finally had the opportunity to turn years of experimentation into something more serious. His studies gave him the theory behind the machines he had spent years trying to understand, while hands-on projects taught him that engineering rarely worked as neatly in reality as it did on paper. A simulation could behave perfectly while the physical prototype failed, a sensor could produce inconsistent readings, or a motor could overheat for reasons he had not anticipated. Linus found himself enjoying these problems rather than avoiding them. He could spend hours tracing a fault, testing different solutions, and staying behind after everyone else had left just to understand why a robot was behaving differently from what the code predicted.

His interests gradually centered on autonomous machines that could solve practical problems and assist people. He became particularly interested in situations where a robot could go somewhere dangerous before a person had to. The idea was simple: if a machine could safely handle the dangerous part of a job, there was no reason to put someone at unnecessary risk. It became a principle that would eventually influence much of his work.

Despite their different interests, Linus remained close to Eli as they grew older. He was never particularly expressive when it comes to affection, but he had his own ways of showing that he cared. He fixed things when they broke, helped when she needed him, and quietly made himself available without making a big deal of it. Their differences never created much distance between them; if anything, they simply became part of what made their relationship work.

By adulthood, Linus had built a life around the same curiosity that had followed him since childhood. The machines had become more complicated and the problems more demanding, but the process remained familiar: take it apart, understand what went wrong, change something, test it again, and keep going until it works. For Linus, engineering was never about building something impressive just for the sake of it. He wanted to build things that were useful, understand them inside and out, and never be afraid to start over when something inevitably broke.