Six months of self-teaching, one wall, and the movie app that got him hired

Plan A was never engineering

Reagan Kan's certificate says mechanical engineering, but he is upfront that engineering was plan B. Plan A arrived midway through the course, when he started handling video production for his university club: the trailers and promo videos that make campus events look bigger than they are. Somewhere between those shoots, video became the thing he actually wanted to do, and it was still forming as he finished the degree.

So after graduation he followed it. The reality of production hit him harder than he expected. He did not learn as much as he had hoped he would, and the lifestyle that came with the work was not one he could see himself building a future around.

He stepped back and went looking for what he calls a typical office job: not engineering, necessarily, just something with hours that suited his life and his family. After years of dabbling here and there, first in engineering, then in film, he needed something concrete.

One lesson of C++

His entire formal exposure to programming was a single lesson buried inside the mechanical engineering syllabus, where a lecturer taught the class to build a simple rock paper scissors game in C++. He wished the subject had continued. It did not; they were engineering students, not IT students. But that one lesson did its work on him.

It stripped the mystery off the whole field. "Coding is not so technical. You're really just teaching a robot how to pick things up. You have to move, bring up your hand, go straight, go down, grab it. You're talking in its language." He found that process genuinely interesting, in a way most of the syllabus was not.

It also connected back to something he had watched years earlier: a video full of big names like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg saying coding was going to be the future in ten years. Ten years on, he notes, that is roughly now. At the time it had seemed cool and distant. After the C++ lesson, it seemed cool and possible.

“Take one step at a time. There's a lot of information out there. Trust the process and you will eventually get there.”

You can start now

The push came, as it does for a lot of people, from a friend. The friend was already doing coding work and told him about the job and the salaries. But one detail surprised him more than the money: you did not need a certificate from a big college to begin.

"That was like: oh, I can start now. It wasn't too late." For someone who had already spent years moving between engineering and production, not too late was exactly the thing he needed to hear.

He knew a little coding from that one lesson, so he decided to get properly into it. No classroom, no fees, just himself and the internet. He took the self-taught route, and he gave it six months.

Six months of teaching himself

He taught himself basic JavaScript, and subscribed to a Udemy course to learn Python. The landscape shocked him. When he had watched that video years earlier, none of today's resources existed; now YouTube overflowed with friendly, interactive, code-along-with-me tutorials. So much of it, in fact, that it was too much. Getting in, he says, is the easy part now.

Staying in is the hard part, and he pushes back on anyone who thinks the self-taught route is the easy one. "Self-teaching is doable, but it's very hard. You really need discipline." There is nobody setting the pace. You keep going on your own, or you quietly stop.

His six months were harder than most people's. Two of his loved ones were in critical health condition during that time, and he was caring for them while trying to study, going back and forth between the two. The strain accumulated on top of everything else.

Then he hit the wall. "There were a lot of things where I wished I had someone beside me to just ask: what's going on?" His friend, the one who had told him about coding in the first place, worked in a different area and could not help. He knew he needed help of a more structured kind, so he went looking for it with a quick Google search. That was how he found Sigmaschool.

Checking it wasn't national service

He had heard the word bootcamp before, but he had never actually met one, and his mental image was drastic. "I thought: do I need to pack my bags and go into the woods? Hardcore training, like national service?" Before putting money down, he needed to make sure this was real.

So he came over to the office to check it out in person. The staff were kind about it and gave him a straightforward rundown of what they do, with no theatrics. After that visit, he decided this place could be it for him.

He does not dress up what the decision cost. It was a big gamble. His parents had to fork out for the fee, and he is aiming to repay them. That weight sat on the whole four months.

Not stern at all

He expected a bootcamp to be stern. The word sounds like it, and the format feeds the assumption: three months is short, so surely the pressure has to be brutal to compensate. The reality was the opposite. The staff were friendly, and the people around him were genuinely encouraging.

He was also lucky in his batch. He was grouped with classmates who were all aiming to improve, which forced him to up his own game to match them. He started looking forward to the last day of each module, when everyone presented their project. Standing up and showing what weeks of accumulated hours had produced, he found, was its own motivation to put in more of them.

The welcome mattered more to him than it might have to someone else. Drifting from engineering to production to self-teaching had left him feeling like a loner, a misfit who did not fit into groups, and studying alone at home had not helped. At Sigmaschool, most people were in the same shoes: unsure what came next, carrying a new interest. He got along with the staff and his classmates far better than he had thought he would.

The steep third month

The first two months were somewhat doable. Around the third month the curve went steep, because that is when all the puzzle pieces have to come together into one project. "When you learn the new concepts, a bunch of things come at you, and you start to feel: do I have what it takes?"

What got him through was a discovery about how he learns. "This is one thing I learned during the bootcamp: I'm a very visual learner. I needed to see things through arrows." A mentor, MJ, introduced him to eraser.io, a diagramming tool MJ used himself, and Reagan still shouts him out for it. He used it to map his process end to end, drawing the connections from the back end to the front end until he could see how everything reached the final display.

The other thing he took away has nothing to do with syntax. "I learned the way to talk programming to another human." When you code, everything you are doing lives in your head, especially once you get into the zone. He learned to speak out what he was trying to do, in proper programming terms, because in the end you work in a team, not by yourself, and your teammates need to know what you are trying to build and where you are stuck.

A movie app for a movie lover

His capstone looped all the way back to plan A. He built a movie platform inspired by Letterboxd, a newer cousin of IMDb: users add movies to lists, give ratings, write reviews, and see those reviews displayed on their profile pages, where friends can read them too. A film site, built by the club video guy, with the social layer that makes it fun to show your friends.

The choice of subject was deliberate strategy as much as sentiment. He knew he needed to build something he enjoyed, or at least something whose final product he would enjoy seeing. It came from the same love of movies that had pulled him into video production in the first place, and picking a project he cared about kept him going when the build got hard.

And it did get hard. The final project was the most challenging thing he did in the entire program. It is also the thing he is proudest of. Six months of self-teaching had ended at a wall; three months after walking into Sigmaschool, he had produced something whole, and he knew exactly how far he had come.

Four months, then a lucky interview

The job hunt was longer than he expected. He applied a ton: four months of applying and applying before the final job came through. He had been confident a job would come, because he could see the demand for what he had learned, but he had not known it would take that long. Even so, he says he has no regrets about the route.

Then came the interview at H&Y Hyperlink Technology, a startup, where luck met preparation. By pure coincidence, the company's current project was also movie related. He had no idea beforehand. He arrived with his laptop ready and the capstone already loaded, so that when the interviewer wanted to see it, all he had to do was press start. He pressed start.

It caught the interviewer's attention immediately, because Reagan's project was close to what the company itself wanted to build, at a bigger scale. The interviewer was impressed that someone could produce that within such a short period; if one person could do this, he could see a future in it. Reagan does not overclaim his own part in that. Luck, he says, definitely played a big role.

Across all his interviews, nobody ever questioned the bootcamp certificate. "They were more interested in the project, because that's the proof that I know how to do it." His one real worry going into the job had nothing to do with skill. The office mainly converses in Mandarin, which he does not speak. His colleagues switch to English for him, with plenty of back and forth, but unlike a coding problem, language was not something a senior could debug for him.

One month in, and the long view

At the time of this interview he was a month and a week into the job, working as a front end developer. His verdict: great and hard at the same time, but mostly great. His teammates are supportive, his seniors and mentors are really helpful, and one month in he had already found there is a lot left to learn. He counts that as exciting rather than discouraging.

In two years he still sees himself coding. Asked whether he would take a role at a company whose product did not interest him, he is practical about it. Landing a movie related project was fortunate, not planned, and he had been fully prepared to work on something that was not. Beggars can't be choosers, he says; he is not in a position to choose, and experience is experience.

It is a quieter kind of ambition than the one that pulled him into film, but it is pointed in a direction he chose, which is more than either of his first two paths could say.

Put the hours in

His advice for anyone holding a degree in one field and an itch for another is the line he lived by: take one step at a time, because there is a lot of information out there, and trust the process, because you will eventually get there. It is not dramatic advice. Neither was his path, step by step from one C++ lesson to a career.

On choosing a bootcamp over a computer science degree, he does not oversell it. "Definitely doable. Of course, you have to put the hours in. Not everything is going to hold your hand into this new path as much as you would hope. You yourself have to put in a lot of work."

He put his in, and the path closed its own loop: a mechanical engineering student who chased film, taught himself for six months, hit a wall, and now writes front end code for a movie product. The interests did not cancel each other out. They stacked.