From a KL music studio to building software at Sigmaschool

A music studio in KL

Wanroy Challam had built his life around music. He moved to Malaysia in 2018 for a masters in music production, and after finishing it he worked at a recording studio in Kuala Lumpur. The work was real, but the money wasn't. "It doesn't pay much. I was living paycheck to paycheck."

Towards the end of the pandemic, a friend mentioned coding bootcamps, something he had never heard of. Programming had always interested him. He used to mod video games for fun, so the work didn't feel foreign. It felt like a way out.

Finding a way in

He started googling bootcamps and found most of them crazy expensive. Then he came across Sigmaschool, contacted the team, and got an email breaking down the programmes and the pricing. It was reasonable enough that he decided to commit.

The switch still cost him something. He had come far in music: a masters, studio work, serious skill on the guitar. "I feel like I left a big chunk of my life and then just changed to something else," he says. He hasn't produced a track or played guitar in a year.

“If you're hesitant about it, I don't think it's going to work. You have to be 100% sure that you want to make that change.”

Easier than school

Wanroy did the bootcamp online from his home country, expecting it to be hectic. It wasn't, at least not the way school had been. "It never felt like I was in a lot of pressure," he says, because students could move at their own pace, and his instructor Harris made the concepts easy to understand. From day one it felt like something he could actually do.

The hardest stretch was his capstone project: a web app built on the Spotify API that clones any playlist into your own profile from a pasted link. Most of the battle was reading documentation and understanding it, and he remembers struggling properly for the first time. Figuring it out was the moment he thought a career in this could work.

His favourite part of the whole experience was the group projects. His batch became friends, kept a group chat where everyone helped each other, and the projects felt like working on something big with a real team.

Working before he graduated

In the final month of the bootcamp, around August 2023, Wanroy started interning on Kodio, one of Sigmaschool's products, and stayed on until December. Straight after that he landed his first developer job at a small agency in his hometown that builds websites for hotels and restaurants, where he handled front-end work for a year.

While many in his batch struggled to find work, he was one of two who got hired right away. The job got his foot in the industry, but the company had no fixed working hours and would call at random times of the day with tasks. He decided the schedule wasn't going to work for him and left without a backup lined up.

Two stressful months

What followed was two months of freelance commissions and inconsistent pay. He needed something he could depend on every month, and he knew how hard the field had become to break into without a traditional degree. Then Deric, Sigmaschool's founder, messaged: there was an opening on the team if he wanted to try for it.

"I felt relieved. Right away I was like, yeah, I'm interested." He started on probation, and a couple of months later was asked to join full-time. Today he works on Sigmaschool's LMS, translating course material for the platform, alongside front-end work on its other products. "It still feels surreal. Sometimes I feel like I'm still processing it, like wait, how did I get here?"

Be 100% sure

What he values most about the work is that it's outcome-driven rather than hours-driven. As long as the task gets done, it doesn't matter whether it took six hours or ten, and that keeps the pressure sane. The mindset shift from music was bigger: guitar stays learned once you learn it, but "in coding, everything is different all the time. It's always changing." Keeping up is the job.

His advice for anyone eyeing the same switch is blunt. It's a big risk, especially from a very different background, and you need to join with the mindset that you will get a job in this industry. Hesitation, he says, won't survive it.