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

Plan A was film

Reagan graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering, but by his own account it was plan B. Plan A was video production, an interest that took hold midway through his degree when he found himself making trailers and promo videos for his club. His only taste of code was a single C++ class in the engineering syllabus, where a lecturer had them build a rock-paper-scissors game.

"Coding is not so technical," he realised. "You're really just teaching a robot how to pick things up — talking in its language." He also remembered a video of Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg saying coding would be the future in ten years. But production came first — until the reality of the lifestyle hit him, and he started looking for a regular office job that fit the life he wanted around his family.

Six months alone, then the wall

A friend told him about coding work, and one thing stuck: you could start now, without a certificate from a big college. It wasn't too late. He took the self-taught route for six months — basic JavaScript from YouTube, plus a Udemy course on Python.

It worked, at first. But those months were also some of his hardest: two of his loved ones were in critical health condition, and he was caring for them while trying to study. "Self-teaching is doable, but it's very hard. You need a lot of discipline." Eventually he hit a wall, with nobody beside him to ask what was going on. So he went searching for someone who could help.

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

Making sure it wasn't national service

He'd never heard of a coding bootcamp. "I thought, do I need to pack my bags and go into the woods? Hardcore training, like national service?" So he came to the Sigmaschool office to make sure it was legit, and the staff walked him through what they actually do.

It was still a big gamble. His parents had to fork out for the fee, and he's aiming to repay them. But after six months alone, he decided this place could be it.

Arrows on a whiteboard and a steep third month

He expected a bootcamp to be stern. Instead he found people who were encouraging — staff and classmates alike, most of them in the same shoes: unsure what came next, holding a new interest. Having drifted between fields, he'd felt like a misfit; here, he got along with everyone, and looked forward to the last day of each module, when everyone presented what they'd built.

The hard part came around the third month, when all the pieces had to come together into one project. "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 discovering how he learns: visually. He started mapping his systems as diagrams on eraser.io, drawing arrows from the back end to the front end until the flow made sense.

The other skill he took away had nothing to do with syntax: "I learned the way to talk programming to another human." Speaking out what you're trying to do, instead of keeping it in your head, is what makes teamwork possible.

The interview where both screens showed movies

His capstone went straight back to plan A: a movie platform inspired by Letterboxd, where users rate films, write reviews, build lists, and see their friends' reviews on profile pages. "I knew I needed to do something I enjoy, or enjoy seeing the final product."

The job hunt took four months of applying, and applying, and applying. Then came an interview where luck met preparation: the company's current project happened to be movie-related too. He pulled out his laptop with the project already running and demoed it. The interviewer was impressed that someone could build that in such a short period — it was close to what he wanted to build himself.

Nobody questioned the bootcamp certificate. "They were more interested in the project, because that's the proof that I know how to do it." His only worry going in was language — the office mainly speaks Mandarin, and he doesn't. His colleagues switch to English for him.

Trust the process

A month and a bit into the job, he's doing front-end work at a startup with supportive teammates and mentors, and finding there's a lot left to learn — which he counts as exciting. In two years he still sees himself coding, whatever the domain.

His advice for anyone with a degree in one thing and an itch for another is the line he lived by: take one step at a time, trust the process, and you'll get there. And on skipping the traditional route: "Definitely doable. But you have to put the hours in. Not everything is going to hold your hand into this new path — you yourself have to put in a lot of work."