The real reason I decided to learn to code (best decision I made in my life)

Learning to code got me into depression. But it TRANSFORMED my life.

Just a few years ago, I was stuck in a job that I hated and I honestly had no idea what I was gonna do with my life.

But then I discovered something that completely changed my life. 

Back in 2019, I was working in a job that I didn’t enjoy, I was basically crunching numbers in the finance and venture capital industry - feeling like I was just going through the motions, coasting through every day.

I knew I wanted more, but I didn’t know where to start.

In 2019, I stumbled across coding from a software developer I met at a startup conference in Malaysia. 

He basically built a web application all on his own, launched it, and a few months later he was just passively making $20,000, EVERY. SINGLE. MONTH. Recurring revenue!! AND THE BEST PART! He was only in his 20s.

When I heard that, I was like WHAT THE HECK. THATS MY DREAM LIFE!. IIt sounded so far from reality to me back then.

The mind boggling thing for me back then was he told me he didn’t go to university to learn it, he taught himself how to code in like 6 months and he told me that I could do it too. And that he didn’t have a team or any funding. Just a laptop, a good internet connection and his own two hands!

And he honestly seemed like a really humble, simple, down to earth guy. Not some genius that you would expect to be doing this.

It was a total game changer in the trajectory of my life. It was completely new to me. 

All my friends, family and people around me basically went on the normal path of getting a job after graduation and in Malaysia the average salary is around $1000/month.

Never have I even REMOTELY considered the probability of being able to build something with only a laptop and my own 2 hands and make money passively. And never have I considered that you could do it yourself. 

I always thought it was reserved for the geniuses like Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook or that you ended a ton of funding to hire software developers to build your own thing.

It seemed intimidating—something only geniuses could do. I never saw myself as a tech guy or a genius at maths.

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that this might be my way out of the rut.

I had no tech background, no special skills, just a burning desire to change my life. And I decided to leave my job and give coding a shot.

Fast forward to today, and I’ve gone from zero coding experience to running my own $80,000/month tech company and leading a team of around 20 people.

Learning to code didn’t just give me a new skill—it opened doors I never thought possible.

By the end of this video, you’ll understand why learning to code might be the key to unlocking your full potential, and how it can transform your career—and your life.

So continuing from the incident where I met the tech founder making $20,000/month passively.

The truth is that alone didn’t make me take the plunge.

There was a BIGGER reason why I decided to take the plunge. Here’s why:

Our future as a society and nation IS AT STAKE!

I saw this on a very good blog called Waitbutwhy. It's by a really smart guy and he writes about all things. From relationships to space exploration to startups to philosophy to tech. 

When you see this graph, what do you think? 

Well.. You’re probably thinking of a few things. For example:

• We’re at the end of our linear growth as a society
• Something big is coming
• Human progress grows exponentially.

And you’re right.

It does seem like a pretty intense place to be standing.

But then you have to remember something about what it’s like to stand on a time graph.

The thing about time graphs is that you can’t see what’s to your RIGHT.

Humans cannot know what will happen in the future. We can only make estimated guesses. 

We dont know what's going to happen next year, or tomorrow or even the very next second. If you could see what’s to the right of the X-axis. You’re probably a billionaire now.

But here’s how it actually feels to stand there: Which probably feels pretty normal. Right? It’s basically where we are right now.

Imagine taking a time machine back to the 17th century.

 A time when the world didn't have proper electricity, we didn’t have phones, didn't have computers and we couldn't have any form of long distance communication. 

So imagine when you get there, you retrieve a person, bring him to 2015, and then walk him around and watch him react to everything. 

It’s impossible for us to understand what it would be like for him to see shiny trains or cars, video calling with people who 1000s of miles away from you, rewatch a video of a musical performance that happened 50 years ago, and mobile phones must seem like a magical object that allowed him to capture a real-life image or record a living moment, generate a map with a moving blue arrow that shows him where he is with GPS. 

And this is all before you show him the internet or explain things like the International Space Station or nuclear weapons or cryptocurrencies.

But here’s the interesting thing.

If he then went back to the 17th century.

And if he’d take the time machine and go back the same distance, get another person from around the 15th century, bring him to the 17th century, and show him everything. 

Well.. 15th century guy would be shocked by a lot of things.  It would be far less of an insane experience for him. 

Yes. While the 17th century and 15th century were very different, they were much less different than the 17th century to 2015.

Does that make sense?  The 15th century guy would learn some mind-bending stuff about space and physics, he’d be impressed with how committed Europe turned out to be with all the new imperialism stuff, and he’d have to do some major revisions of his world map conception.

But watching everyday life go by in 17th century—transportation, communication, etc, would still be pretty similar to what's happening in the 15th century.

This pattern— where human progress moving quicker and quicker as time goes on—is what futurist Ray Kurzweil calls as the human history’s Law of Accelerating Returns. 

This happens because more advanced societies have the ability to progress exponentially faster than less advanced societies.

So that's his point.  Which I agree. Just look at the advancements of AI in the past one and a half year since ChatGPT launched. Things are changing literally every week theres a new tech and in fact theres an arm race on AI development now. 

But I digress.

And long story short.  i hope i’m not boring or confusing any of you here but the point im trying to make is. We know something will happen. Very soon. 

We dont know exactly what it is. Or when it will happen, But we know it will happen. And we have to be prepared for it.

And to summarise this before I move on,

This is a quote by Vinod Khosla. An indian-American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist. And this quote perfectly summarises it. 

Humans think linearly but tech trends are exponential.

Don't be the boiling frog

This is the “Frog in the boiling water syndrome”.  I’m sure you must’ve seen this before at some point in your life right? 

So this is how the story goes. 

If you throw a frog into a pot of boiling water it will jump out immediately but if you put it in room temperature water and gradually increase the heat, it will stay in the pot until it dies. 

And this picture also perfectly summarises it. People have a strong tendency to slowly get used to things that would shock them if they saw them with their fresh eyes.

This is the Gartner hype cycle. Gartner is the worlds largest market research firm that releases this picture every year. 

It shows you all the emerging technologies with the potential to disrupt industries.

You know, for context. you can think of the internet as back in the days. 

Everyone was hyping it up and investors were throwing money everywhere. Throwing millions of dollars at any company that has a “.com” on it.

until we hit the dotcom bubble in 1995. where we went through the trough of disillusionment. and then it eventually picked up again. 

All new tech essentially goes through the same thing. 

And each dot you see over here has the potential to disrupt industries. 

The question is. Are we prepared?

As a nation and as an individual. 

What are we doing to be a part of this change? 

Are we even aware of it??

And How can we go the extra mile and take the lead in this?

These are part of the things that really got me thinking.

And here Megan Smith, the former CTO of the US. Is saying this. 

She thinks it's a practical vision. Imagine a country where all of its citizens have the ability to code. I personally think it's very doable too.

And if that's the direction the world is moving, our country will need to work a lot harder to compete on the world stage. 

And if our leaders are not pushing for it, it's our responsibility as citizens to up our game in whatever we do.

OK. So now you’ve seen MY WHY. This is literally what got me looking into tech at all in the first place.

My f**k it moment - This is why I needed to make the plunge

Back in 2019, I read about the producer or consumer society and it really got me thinking.

And it was a real wake up call. I knew I needed to make the plunge.

You know what colonialism is right? 

Now check out digital colonialism.

So basically Under classic colonialism

Europeans conquered different countries for profit and power, they pretty much took ownership and control of critical infrastructure and exploited weaker countries for their own benefit. 

Under this arrangement, imperial powers designed railways for foreign empires.

Native peoples were exploited to extract raw materials, which were sent back to Europe for manufacturing. 

Then, surplus European products would then flood the colonies, undermining the indigenous population’s ability to develop its own local industries. So thats history and we probably have a good idea of how that works. so i'm not gonna go so much into that.

And in the grand scheme of things it has mostly ended. Which is good.

Now theres a next wave of colonialism happening.

It’s called digital colonialism.

its Similar to the technical architecture of classic colonialism. The difference is, today, the power lies with data. Big Tech corporations use proprietary software, corporate clouds, and centralised Internet services to spy on users, process their data, and spit back manufactured services to users.

In South Africa, Google and Facebook dominate the online advertising industry, Uber has captured so much of the traditional taxi industry that drivers have been petrol bombed in the “South African taxi wars”.

Meanwhile, Netflix is buying up content in Africa and pulling subscribers away from local television services. In fact, i’m not sure if you guys know this but netflix is is now the number one source of Internet traffic across the world. 

Amazon Web Services AWS market share in the worldwide cloud infrastructure market is 31 percent in the first quarter of 2024. 25% by Microsoft and 10% by Google. 

The common denominator, they’re all from the US! That's where your data is being stored at.

And my My point is. Some companies overseas know more about you than you know about yourself. They know more than your families know about you.

Is our country ready for that? What are we doing about it?

Ok so back to the topic right. Consumer mindset vs producer mindset. What is it?

The way i see it.

We are all consumers. We spend our days reading, listening, eating, and buying. We buy things we don’t need to make us happy. 

A constant consumption of newer and better things. We work to afford the newest clothes, the nice car, the expensive dinner out.

But none of this will add happiness to our lives. 

True happiness comes from helping others — from carving out our own path. It comes from the confidence gained by knowing that you can succeed in your dream.

For me, I get maximum fulfillment from being able to help my students at Sigma School completely transform their lives from being in an unfulfilled career, to learning a new skill like software development in 3 months, and landing a job after that. 

When they send me their success stories and thank you letters nad positive reviews, it genuinely warms my heart and pushes me to grind through another day.

So thats me.

 But for As long as you remain only a consumer you will not have the fulfillment you desire. 

A consumer can never get enough. They can never be truly happy. They will always look at the world through the lens of what they can get from it, instead of what they can give to it.

Producers, on the other hand, strive to make something valuable to others. They receive their payment not only monetarily, but through the confidence of self that they don’t require anyone else to survive in this world.

It’s not as hard as you might think. You don’t have to have a large fabrication shop selling millions of items.

You could simply start a blog.

You could put out information that can help others going through the same experiences you’ve gone through. 

You could build a tool that makes life easier for others.

The producer mindset allows you to view the world through the opposite lens. This lens will keep you striving to find new ways to provide value and allows you to see how others are doing the same.

And 99% of the world are consumers. Think about it. How are you going to stand out if you’re yet another consumer? 

To stand out and add value, I would say that you NEED to have a producer mindset, or at least try to have one..

The producer vs consumer society. Is your country prepared?

Here are some questions to ask ourselves.

I’m from Malaysia and wherever you are watching this you could probably relate this to your country too.

• What are our primary growth industries?
• What will be our core skills as a society?
• What will Malaysia be famous for when foreigners think of us?
• How will Malaysia proper and grow, and not just survive?
• Is our education system producing enough techies?
• Are we building a strong community for innovation in this country?

Agriculture, palm oil, oil and gas contributes to 35-40% of Malaysia's GDP.

Its ok for the past few decades, that's fine. 

But eventually we’ll need to grow the pie bigger. 

And the only thing that we're able to do so with is technology and entrepreneurship. 

Because if you think about it, economics point of view.

The primary factors of production for an economy are labour, capital and land. 

All of which are limited. Tech is the only thing that allows you to broaden the pie with a disproportionate amount of input. 

And I know we can do better.  as individuals and as a nation. 100%.

So with all this in mind. 

I considered my opportunity cost, which is the value of the next best alternative you give up when you make a choice.​ For example, I have 8 hours a day for work. 9 - 5. 

If i choose to spend my 9-5 gaming and consuming, I’ll gain some level of cheap dopamine, and that's pretty much hit. 

If i choose to spend my 9-5 working in a job, I’ll get a salary, and probably some new skills if i’m lucky, and some new connections from the job.

If i choose to spend my 9-5 building my own startup from scratch. I’ll have to forgo a salary, and forgo the cheap dopamine from gaming. But i’ll measure the upside in terms of learning, living a more fulfileld life, or having a much higher earning potential than workingin a job.

In simple terms, if i chose to do a startup, I have to forgo my salary as an employee. 

And my mindset was. The opportunity cost increases with every day I waited. Because my earning potential would be higher down the line. 

When i first started my career it was around RM3-4000 but if i waited months or years. It would be 5-6000 and it would make it even more difficult to leave because ten my opportunity cost becomes almot double. 

So why not just do it now. I was young, extremely unhappy and unfulfilledd with my day job and I was lucky to be staying with my parents and at the state of my life where I didn’t have to provide for my family.

The top 10 companies in the US are tech companies - think fb, amazon, alibaba, netflix, youtube, google etc

I didnt have business skills. So i didnt know what to do.

The idea, is to learn to code, and partner up with experienced business people and provide my tech skills as sweat equity, or build my own startup

Or worst case scenario, I’ll just find a good job as a sfotware developer.

I thought to myself. The best time to do it is now. the downside is a few months of salary and a risk of people looking at me like an unemployed loser. But the upside is i compeltely transform my life trajectory and life a more fulfilled life.

So lets do it.

Do it alone, do it scared, do it broke. Just do it.

My starting points

Before I go any further, hey everyone my name is Deric. And just to give you a brief idea on who i am and what i’ve been doing, so i can be completely transparent with you without hiding anything and be fully authentic with my journey. so you will at least know who i am. 

I come from a background in Finance & Venture Capital, and have been working and actively exploring the venture capital industry for a while, in the UK and in Malaysia. 

And for those of you who don’t know what venture capital is, It’s simple. Just think of startups today. Imagine yourself as founder. You have a cool business idea. But you dont have the money to build it. Or you dont have the money to hire your marketing team, design team, tech team, customer service, so many other things. You need money. You can’t go to the banks.

Because you need a big amount of money and banks are heavily regulated and they’ll not give you the money because you’re still a nobody. 

And if you’re like me, you probably don’t want to go to loan sharks and you don’t have a rich father or rich uncles in your family.

So who do you go to? 

You go to venture capitalists who will invest in you at an early stage for you to get your ideas running, with the hopes of you becoming big some day and they get to 10x or 100x their investments in you. So that’s that. 

Coming from a finance background i always thought i wanted to be on the finance and investment side of things. but over time after dealing with a lot of other VCs and dealing with a lot of really really dynamic and impressive entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs really inspired me when I see how they move so super fast, learn fast and just think very critically and creatively. 

I’ve always been interested in business. So one fine day while I was at my desk job as an analyst. I asked myself. What is it that i really wanted. Is it crunching numbers all day for my boss? Is it doing a ton of research on companies? No. I wanted to build a business. And I just asked myself one single question. What is the one skill set that allows me to build once and scale to impact millions or even billions of lives? 

It was simple. tech was the only thing that enabled that. just think about it. whatever you’re using today. your facebooks, airbnbs, your website builders, your marketing tools, they are backed by tech i can guarantee it. 

So long story short throughout my journey in this i’ve started with self-learning code but have gone on to teach myself skills by skill stacking in marketing, design, project management, business development, growth hacking to now recently making rm350k/month which is around usd80k/month.

This is from running a coding school, managing a software development house and from building startups 

What people don't know

Here's the thing, here's what many people don't know because they don't see it. What many people don't know is that I was brought up in a very traditional and average asian upbringing and I was taught to work hard, study hard, and most of this advice came from my parents.

So what happened was ever since young I was told to strive for the best school results. I did pretty well in school all my life, But i was never asked what it was that I was passionate about. And I never questioned it. I was pretty much on autopilot just following the default safe life path.

So I really just went with the flow and took whatever subject seemed cool. So I did finance. First semester in i already knew it wasn’t for me. But I just went with it because hey, I never questioned my university. I never questioned my own interests and I never even thought of going against the traditional route and figuring out what I truly wanted before committing to it.

Come to think of it. I probably decided on my degree in less than a month. This makes absolutely no sense when i think back now. People go to university fully prepared to take up loans up to 100-200 thousands and commit their life plans to that one career after 1-2 month of deciding as an 18 year old person. 

I’m not saying everyone is like this but I know many are. And i bet many of you watching this can relate too.

Struggles & Breakthroughs

So long story short. when I decided to pursue the path in tech and entrepreneurship. You can imagine how it was like. i am a 23 year old. fresh graduate. no money. no job. everyone enjoying their jobs and not supporting me for my decision. 

I didn’t have money or time to do an university degree all over again, so what I did was I locked myself at home. This is how my day is set up. 9AM - 12AM, every single day. Coding. No vacations, no off-time, no social meetups, no holidays. 

Just code, practice, and spamming projects. All day, every day. It was one of the lowest points in my life. I was not paid. didn’t have an income, was completely unemployed, couldn't even go out for expensive meals with my friends, couldn’t afford gifts for my ex girlfriend. I just kind of exempted myself from all social life.  

I question myself all the time. like. Is this really for me? Can I really do this? Maybe coding isn’t for me after all. Gave up multiple times. Applied for finance jobs. Still couldn’t get a job. Got even more depressed. Continued coding. 

So this whole thing, it took me around a year.

All alone, I didn’t have mentors or friends or a community at all, every time I saw some advice from random people online I tried it. Every time I google learn how to code on google I get thousands of suggested links. 

I didnt know which one to go with. Javascript, Ruby, Python.

I've done a little bit of everything. But none good enough to actually deliver and build anything up from scratch.

Looking back now it's one of the best decisions i made challenging myself to do something for myself. Then eventually, people started knowing i’ve been learning to code and my friend with an CS degree asked me to to do a job interview for him. He couldn’t do it at all and I had to teach him and do it for him. That’s when I realised I'm on to something. So I felt more motivated, and continued learning and learning.

And eventually, I landed my first project. Not long after, my second. 

First one was worth $2000. Its not alot in the grand scheme of things but it meant a lot to me. It took me a crazy amount of time to even get here and this is a very good validation to my skill sets. Shortly after that, my second project at around $10,000. So this was when I could finally afford to fund my lifestyle a little bit more. Not long after, I landed the third one worth $100k. 

The life it bought me

So that’s how I started and I just continued to build, do projects, build startups.

So many obstacles and issues from the start but we just gotta get through day by day, 1 step at a time.

Fast forward to today, 

We’re a team of 20 now, and did around RM350k/month recently.

Helped over 30 of my students get jobs in tech to date. With more than 50 more in the pipeline as we speak.

We’re serving a few bigger clients on retainer, as well as building my own tech startup in the HR space.

I love travelling and exploring and this year I’ve already travelled once each month.

I’ve been to Bali twice this year, travelled Thailand, hiked the tallest mountain in Malaysia - Kota Kinabalu, went to Japan and I’ll be going to China and Vietnam by the end of the year. 

I’ve learned a lot, made a TON of mistakes, literally burned over $200k to date in the past few years on various tech startups that didn’t work out. And honestly i’m still taking life one step at a time.

But if you told me this would be the life I have now, I wouldn’t believe it.

Learning to code has genuinely been the best decision in my life. This gave me a freedom I could never imagine 3 years back.

I no longer have to worry about cash flow like I did 5 years back. 

I get to attract and inspire my team to genuinely be fulfilled in their job and to learn any skill to overcome any obstacles because I have done it and i’m not just plain talking fluff

I get to mentor startups in the Malaysian startup ecosystem and accelerator programmes/

I get to work with my students in the coding bootcamp that I run now, Sigma School. Where we train them coding in 3 months and help them get jobs after that or we give them their money back. We have students from Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, Singapore, and even France, Germany and UK recently!

I get to create content like this and document my journey to hopefully help inspire just 1 person to make a change for themselves.. That would make me very happy.

I get to build any tech startups that I want to. Any ideas? I can build it. I don't have to worry about funding, technical talents, or any other self limiting beliefs people have before starting a new venture.

I know that most things can be figured out with enough time and effort because I fundamentally know how software works.

I’ve had my fair share of letdowns with contractors and developers and nowI don't have to worry about getting scammed by developers or agencies.

Money aside.

I gained so much more in terms of mindset and self development.

I live on the principle where anything that can be automated, should be automated.

So that humans can do what humans do best, and be creative in terms of growing the business with me.

Code opened the doors to understanding automation tools and project management tools easily. 

Most of the process flows from start to end has been built out with AIrtable with API integrations to many of our different tools like our internal project management tool - Plane.so, our learning platform, our accounting system, our marketing dashboards.

Everything is linked up so that its easy for us to get the data we want, fast and accurate. And things can happen on its own with zero human supervision.

I can allow my team to run on the 80:20 principle. Where 80% of the time they focus on achieving their goals on their tasks. And 20% they can dedicate to learning new tools or skills, instead of doing mindless work that could be automated.

This ensures everyone in my team gets the space and freedom to continuously improve themselves in their career.

And the BEST PART. Is the confidence it gives me. 

I know that if my startups fail and everything comes crashing down, I can still make a living helping companies build software or manage their teams like I’m doing now.

If you got to this point of the article and if you want to make a change, write down 1 action point you're gonna take as a result of reading this.

Thank you for reading and I hope this helps!

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