He learnt to code while caring for his sick father

Drones, then everything stopped

Adam graduated in mechanical engineering with no IT background to speak of. He had learnt some C++ fundamentals years earlier, but barely remembered any of it. Through and after his degree he worked at a drone company, doing work he loved.

Then things unravelled. The company stopped paying him for a few months — he stayed on out of passion for the work — and then his father fell sick, with no one else to look after him. He quit his job to care for his dad.

Those months at home left him with a lot of spare time. He remembered he had signed up to Sigmaschool a year or two earlier and never explored it properly. "I thought, oh, it's a good time to just go back." So he used the whole time he was caring for his father to pursue web development.

JavaScript, one small project at a time

At the start, web development was all he could see, and JavaScript was the only language he knew. Understanding how the language actually worked was the hardest part. His fix was not more reading — it was projects, small ones, constantly: a timer, a to-do list, the normal stuff you see online.

"Coding is like maths," he says. "If you always do it, at one point you just know how to do it." You can't fully explain it any more — it just clicks.

The resources helped too. CSS games like Flexbox Froggy taught him to visualise layouts instead of staring at boxes, and Sigmaschool's projects — including a dinosaur game — taught him how pure functions in JavaScript actually work. The sheer range of material opened his eyes to how much of tech exists beyond web development.

“Always be coding. If you always do that thing, you're going to improve and you will get there. It's just time and effort.”

An interview earned washing plates

His first tech job came from a wedding. He was helping a friend out by washing plates when another friend beside him mentioned he knew a manager at a company, and offered to connect them. Adam's projects were not deployed anywhere — but he had recorded them all on his phone, and showed the recordings. The reply: this looks cool, send me a resume.

The interview itself was brutal. He had only ever done HTML, CSS and JavaScript, and the role was full stack. The assessment: build a complete app with login and authentication — React, TypeScript, GraphQL, TypeORM, PostgreSQL — in about five days.

He slept two to three hours a day, called friends for help, and shipped it. He got the job.

Two years of backend and 17 vulnerabilities

That first role at a Malaysian software house turned out to be almost entirely backend — maybe five per cent of it touched the UI. The project he is proudest of started as a corridor conversation: he told a colleague on the cloud team that an upcoming penetration test sounded interesting, word travelled up to his boss, and suddenly the job was his.

He worked through the findings and eliminated 17 vulnerabilities, leaving only minor edge cases. More importantly, it showed him that software engineering is far bigger than frontend and database mapping. "It opened my eyes to what's out there."

After nearly two years he decided to move — not because he had stopped growing, but because he needed a different environment and a change of pace.

Frontend at The Access Group

His second job also came through a referral: a frontend developer role at The Access Group, a UK-based company, working on one of its many products. Both of his tech jobs came through connections — his one-word explanation is networking.

The hardest part of the role isn't the code. It's the corporate scale of it — dealing with clients, chasing tickets, waiting on other teams, knowing a client's delay lands on you. "Communication is always the most important thing," he says, and he is still figuring parts of it out.

Longer term, he wants to explore freelancing, and eventually cloud and cybersecurity — his aim is to be a generalist.

It's always going to suck, and that's okay

Adam is open about imposter syndrome: he feels it every day, even now. His insight is that you are always measuring yourself against who you want to become, never against where you started — and if you actually look back, the difference is a whole other level.

The same goes for your old code. "You go back and look at your code and think, who wrote this? It's always going to be like that. It's going to repeat again and again — and that's fine."

His advice for anyone starting out: software development is not just web development. There are systems, DevOps, data, cloud, AI — do your research first on which role you actually want. Then follow the ABCs — always be coding. "Invest in your time and effort. 10,000 hours, however many hours you need — you'll get there."