From games programmer to full stack engineer, nearly 60 applications later

A shop lot class at 13

Kaz wrote his first line of code at 13. He and his mum were out shopping when they passed a shop lot with a class on the second floor teaching kids and teenagers website programming, and she asked if he wanted to try. His reasoning was a 13 year old's: he liked playing games, and maybe this was the same thing. He said yes, and started building websites.

The same logic carried him through school. After SPM, choosing between computer science and game development, he picked games: he liked playing them, so he would learn to make them. The degree at KDU ran two and a half years.

That early start shaped everything that came after. When an interviewer later asked about his backup plan if software did not work out, he had none to offer. Programming had been his thing since 13, he said, so he would succeed or die trying. There was no plan B to fall back on.

Two jobs and the tutorial loop

After the degree came two jobs: one in game development, which gave him solid C++ and C#, and one he describes as a very junior, self-taught full stack role. He is careful not to call that period a failure. It worked, but being self-taught had its flaws, and he can name the biggest one precisely.

"The term that's been used online is 'tutorial baby'. You keep going through online tutorials, but there are many ways to solve a problem, and tutorials only tell you one way. To really get it, you have to actually do it." He knew he had to get out of the tutorial loop. What he did not have was a structure for doing it.

He still defends self-learning; it taught him to problem solve without being handheld. But he had reached the point of diminishing returns, and he knew it. Why not have someone guide the process, he reasoned, and speed things up?

“Traditional education has the opportunity to go deep, while a bootcamp has the opportunity to go wide. It's a great place to kickstart, learn new knowledge, and see whether you want to venture deeper after.”

Two years of searching

There is also a two year gap sitting in his portfolio from before Sigmaschool, and he is unusually open about what filled it. He went for coaching sessions, practised meditation, and worked through content from Healthy Gamer GG, a channel focused on mental health. He calls the period searching: finding his identity, his sense of self.

That gap would later come up in almost every job interview he sat, paired with questions about his unusual qualifications. At the time, though, it was simply two years the industry would read as nothing, while his job search went badly.

He kept his hands moving with a puzzle site that publishes a new coding challenge for every day of December, something like a seasonal Leetcode. That was what he was doing when his partner stepped in with the observation that changed his direction: he was still interested in programming, still doing code puzzles for fun, and his job search was not working. Why not stop aiming only at game development, widen the net, and give Sigmaschool a try?

Four months, not a year and a half

He knew what bootcamps were. He had even looked at the one run by Fireship, the YouTuber famous for 100 second rundowns of programming languages. Two things had always stopped him from signing up anywhere. The first was cost: the well known bootcamps are priced in US dollars, and with the exchange rate, the numbers were insane.

The second was time. Most programs he found ran six months, a year, even a year and a half. "A year and a half's investment, I would have lost quite a lot of time compared to four months." He understood the depth those programs were selling. He just could not afford the years.

Sigmaschool cleared both bars, and he did his homework before committing. He watched the student story videos on the website, the recorded interviews with graduates. He heard great things, came in with an open mind since this was his first bootcamp, and by his own account was not disappointed.

The four months were not soft. There were weeks diving into state management and API calls, with plenty of leeway to self-study. Modules two and three, front end and back end, were where the guidance mattered most. Module four was the final month project, hands-on and largely self-driven: everything from the previous three months plus all his self-taught experience, bundled together so he could test whether he could really do it.

Online from Penang

Kaz took the course online from Penang. Given better financial circumstances, he says plainly, he would have gone onsite: getting to know the instructor and his peers face to face is better. But it is what it is, a phrase that is practically his motto, and online it was.

The most memorable part of the course was not a module. A student in his batch set up a private study group, the online equivalent of booking a library room at a physical university, open to whoever wanted to join. "Everyone was discussing their opinions and thought process: why this code works, why it's good practice, why it's bad practice. Those were good times." It beat being what he calls a missile silo, thinking one way with nobody to challenge you.

Not everything went smoothly. He had agreed to help two batchmates with their final month projects, and one of them vanished into thin air without notice, which he found jarring. He also carried a quieter struggle through the course: how to mingle in a group without always being the eccentric one. Whether he fit in by the end is a question he leaves to his peers to answer, not himself.

When final project presentations came around, he flew from Penang to KL to present in person. The flight was delayed and he walked in an hour late, but he had wanted to see everyone face to face at least once, and late was better than not at all.

A concert platform eight years in the making

The capstone idea came from a very specific grievance. A band he had wanted to see live had not performed in Malaysia for years; by his count the gap ran to eight. The way he heard it, organisers had messed up the band's first Malaysian show badly enough that the country got a bad reputation, and later tours went to Singapore and Jakarta instead. His first thought was that maybe he could build the thing that convinced them to come back. Then he realised someone had already managed that the year before. He decided to build it anyway.

He did not commit on impulse, because he never does. "I usually don't listen to my impulses on the spot. I just let it sit, let it cook, and then all right, we do it." The idea survived two or three days of contemplation, and no other idea ever seriously competed with it.

What he built was a concert management platform with two halves. The public side serves concertgoers booking tickets and organisers booking venues: a stadium like Bukit Jalil is owned by property management, not by the performers, and someone has to sit in the middle. The admin side gives the back end view: every ticket booking, every concert being organised, the middleman connecting organisers with venue owners. No real payments, he is quick to add. A final month project is a mock. But that is the goal.

The project requirement was mainly front end. He built a proper back end as well. "I wanted to challenge myself and do both, become a real full stack."

The accountability spreadsheet

He graduated at the end of April, and from there the job hunt ran on a system he had built long before Sigmaschool: a spreadsheet he calls the accountability spreadsheet. Every application went in. By the time he was hired, the count was close to 60. During the interview for this story he happily screen shared it and explained that it is nothing fancy: a simple Google Sheets table tracking who responded, who rejected, and which approaches he was testing, down to whether submitting cover letters actually changed the statistics.

He deliberately did not mass apply. He picked companies that fit his criteria, roughly ten a week rather than hundreds, which made the arithmetic of rejection more personal: some weeks, all 15 to 20 outcomes were rejections or silence. Ghosting, he points out, is the same as rejecting. It happens, and it is what it is.

Sigmaschool's job support plugged into the system. The school provides a job tracker after graduation, and he used its notes field to dump the job description and his entire cover letter for each application, then brought them to meetings and asked the team what they thought. The cover letters, which he had found genuinely hard to draft, improved over time.

Answering for the gap

Interviewers kept circling the same two things: why someone with a game development degree from KDU was now arriving via a bootcamp, and what happened during the two year gap. Those two, he says, were the main criteria in almost every interview.

The interviews that went well were the ones where he answered with full honesty. The gap was coaching and finding himself, and he said so plainly. The switch had a technical logic he could walk them through: at his second games company he had noticed that multiplayer games do not exist without back end development, the same discipline software companies hire for. Nothing wrong with widening the net.

Landing his current job at YYC taxPOD took at least three interviews. He demoed the capstone front to back, and when they asked how the site performed, he showed them its Lighthouse scores. What they actually cared about surprised him. "If I can prove that I can move from one tech stack to another, and articulate the problems I faced and how I solved them, that is more valuable to them than my qualifications."

The rejections along the way never made him doubt the bootcamp. They fed something older: imposter syndrome, the question of whether a jack of all trades who was neither a games specialist nor a software specialist was fit for the industry at all. His remedy is deliberate. "Everyone's circumstances are different. Comparison is the sin of every negative emotion that comes after. Compare less, appreciate what we have, and move forward. Every mistake is a lesson."

Mobile view on day one

He had told the company honestly that he was looking for a mid level role: a little ahead of junior, not good enough for senior. They suggested he give the senior level a shot anyway, and he said sure.

On his first day, the task landed. The product was already released, and he was to read through the entire codebase and make the whole thing mobile responsive, every feature they could find. Alongside that, he was put in charge of building APIs and wiring them to the front end: server talks to database, front end calls the API and gets the JSON, the full cycle. At his old games job, his first task as a junior had been a login page.

He calls the first stretch panicky and shocking, and he is specific about why. Memorising is not his strength; he adapts to new tech, drops the old, and picks it back up when needed. The last time he had done mobile responsive work at that scale was five years earlier, and at Sigmaschool mobile view was built as you went, never retrofitted onto a finished product. So he picked everything up very quickly, because there was no other option.

The company also runs on Vue, and Sigmaschool had taught him React. He had never touched Vue, not even once in the bootcamp. Three months in, that jump is the thing he points to. "Back then, a question came and it was: I don't know, let me look. Now I know."

Growth over confidence

Three months in, the mobile view is live and new pages keep arriving, because a growing product never really finishes. He is proud of it, carefully. Asked about confidence, he redirects the question: confidence is not something he thinks about daily. What he tracks is how much he has grown since the first day, and by that measure the growth has been huge.

He is equally careful about the senior title. He does not think it is fair to compare him with other bootcamp graduates, because he arrived with two and a half years of game development behind him and proficiency in C++ and C#, now joined by JavaScript and PHP. The pay, he says, is on the market: not above, not below.

And he keeps his own caution close. "Yes, I am proficient, but up to a level, because I still need more exposure. There are too many things to learn. I am not at the top of the mountain. I'm still climbing."

Games versus software

His picture of the two fields is a Venn diagram: software development is the huge circle, and game development is one tiny circle inside it. Games are harder at the beginning, he says. But scale a software project properly, take a database migration from 400 users to a million, and the difficulty lands about on par with games. He estimates around two thirds of his games skills transferred over.

The bias he carried for years, wanting to make the best game possible, has dissolved into something more useful. The knowledge moves in both directions now, so what is wrong with having both? He has no preference anymore.

The future gets the same treatment as everything else: a plan, loosely held, because his job search taught him that not everything goes to plan. He applied to games companies during the hunt and the specs were too high; the studio Double Eleven once approached him, then found a better fit. Companies do what companies do, he says, and he will try again next time. If a games company ever offers him less than he earns now, he has a second spreadsheet for that, tracking his monthly finances. If the pay would mean living paycheck to paycheck, he asks whether the role is junior, mid, or senior, and lets the answers make the final call.

Ask why before you jump

His advice for anyone eyeing the same switch starts with a question, not a course. Why did you enrol in game development in the first place, and what is driving you toward software now? He has seen both honest answers. Some people are escaping crunch, and games crunch is worse than anything in software. Some are chasing pay, because entertainment industry salaries run lower and fluctuate, while software is more stable.

Then comes the practical audit: how financially stable are you, what options exist to trampoline your progress, and if there are none, can you take the hit of a long job search with a degree that looks wrong on paper? Underneath it all, check for the self punishing doubt that turns every rejection into proof of not being good enough. Question whether that is actually true, he says, or whether you just need to level up a little more. It is not the end of the world.

For him the answer traced back to being 13 and wanting to make games, so he went. What he warns against is the gap between wanting and doing. "Intention without action, we get procrastination. I will apply someday. That won't work."

His verdict on the routes into the field is a calm one. Self-learning teaches you not to be handheld, and he cites the YouTuber ThePrimeagen's line that the best way to learn programming is to make mistakes and learn from them, ideally inside a community. University goes deep, but bolts on years of compulsory courses he never used. A bootcamp goes wide: modules two and three exposed him to both the front end and back end stacks, and by the final project he knew he wanted both. Four months to find your answer, he reckons, beats finding it two years into a degree with a year and a half still to go.