How he taught himself how to code and started working remotely as a refugee

Watch the full interview here : 

In this episode of Stories of Hackers, we talked with one of our team members at The Hacker Collective,Kaiz. Kaiz shares with us his self-taught journey learning how to code and eventually becoming a full stack developer, as a refugee! We hope you guys can learn some new insights from Kaiz’s story and his experience, enjoy!

Hey Kaiz, can you give a short introduction about yourself to our community?

Yea sure, hey guys my name is Kaiz. I'm from Myanmar and I've been here in Malaysia since 2013 so it's been a quite long journey since I've been here I've met people many people here, like Deric (host) and most of them have become my best friend and you know yeah so it's been quite nice since living here.

Can you share more on how life was back in Myanmar? 

Back in Myanmar, I couldn't even use Facebook properly, even though i was passionate in tech stuff,I didn't really have time to, you know, actually, go on and do stuff with that. I was still young at that time, around 14 or 15 years old. I didn't have any internet access in my home so what I had to do was go to the internet cafe and use the internet from there.

Now skip ahead to some of my future, so I arrived in Malaysia in July 2013 and it's my first time moving to a new country, i didn't have much confidence to go around and make new friends, i can't even speak English at that time, after one month of arriving in Malaysia, my parents bought me a new android tablet and that was my first time having a new android tablet. Now fast forward a bit on how I started my journey with coding, which was during 2016 after I finished my school here. I will share more about that coding journey later.

Before all the coding stuff, what was your educational path? Were you more focused on science?

Basically you know before coding started, I didn't have much of an interest in these technologies so what I wanna actually become was medical doctors but then again things didn't go  along with my plan, I didn't plan it to go like this. So how i started coding was actually because of my friend’s father, gave me a link to you know the w33schools juniors so that was my first time learning the HTML using w33 schools and then skip ahead, i solo learn on freecodecamp and so on, that’s how i started my tech journey

Have you worked in any jobs before you transitioned into the tech field? 

After finishing my school i didn't go to a university even though they accepted me but the price was a bit high so i actually kind of worked as a waiter in a restaurant before work as a waiter but then i didn't enjoy because that's not something that i want to do.i don't work too long there ,probably only for six months or seven months then i resigned. After resigning you know i actually thought to myself,  what is the one thing that i want to do in my life so that's  where my coding journey began.

Maybe you can share a bit about your coding journey?

It was an accident to be honest, the way I found myself on this journey was because after I worked as a waiter, I was actually thinking maybe this is not what I want to do. I then went on to w33school and I learned just some basic HTMl and then CSS. I know that I can't do much with that skill if I want to jump into the tech career, which is why I then started to learn about Javascript.

How does a typical day look like for you know back when you were learning?

After I resigned from the job, I was actually thinking, you know, maybe what is the one thing that I want to do with my life? I don't want to be a waiter again and I choose to self learn coding in hopes of getting into the tech field one day.  When I wake up in the morning, I would  go on to every website and every youtube tutorial that I can find and I started to learn from it so basically you know, constant youtubing and constant internet searching actually gets me here. I didn't have to go to the university and stuff,it's way too expensive for me. I didn't even have a laptop at that time, I was actually using an old desktop which was very slow and couldn't even use the internet. Even with these bad conditions, I still continue to learn coding. I will probably start to learn every day from 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m.. 

Ok, based on what I know you joined recode back in 2019,2020, so what happened during 2017 to 2019 these two years?

Ok… this is going to be an interesting one, basically, at that time Javascript got me really struggled so like i had my imposter syndrome and basically I was kind of lost hope during that time and thinking maybe it was not meant for me, because I don't have a degree so like I can compete in this field even though I am confident and I even good enough in Javascript but overthinking part actually came in, so I literally kind of stopped and went back to my old job of being a waiter. It didn't last long, to be honest, only two months and then I resigned because I really didn't enjoy working as a waiter, this is something that's not meant for me so I resigned and then after that reconsider my decision and then get myself working on the code again. 

It was at the end of 2018,  while i was relearning how to code, one of my friends sent me a link saying there’s this bootcamp that is taking refugees so i straight away applied for it and then after one week i got an email that saying that they accepted me so like yeah so that's how my new journey started.

That’s very inspiring, so who’s the one that really inspired you to learn tech as a self-taught?

Well, the one that really inspires me the most is Quincy Larson, the founder of FreeCodeCamp. He provides all these high-quality coding tutorial videos and contents online and he didn't actually make any profit from it, all the videos online are free from ads, and also he pays for the server by the way. Not to mention, the content is really good you know, it's not like they copied other people's content, they actually write out their own content and most of the subscribers like me are now job-ready because of them so yeah he's my inspiration.

Hope you enjoyed this series!

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