How he taught himself web development, doubled his salary and started working remotely in 3 months 

Watch the full interview here : 

In this episode of Stories of Hackers, we chatted with Michael, one of our team members at The Hacker Collective. Michael was a game developer from the Philippines, he joined our course, hoping to transition from game development to web development. Today, Michael works with us as a web developer and we would like you guys to know his story, and hopefully it will inspire you on your journey too, enjoy!

Hey Michael, can you share something about yourself?

Hey guys, i'm Michael or you can also call me MJ, either which is fine. I've been a game developer for two years and I do some indie games on the side when I feel like it. I'm currently a web developer for The Hacker Collective (THC) so my journey started when I actually stumbled upon THC ads randomly. I think I was searching for “how to do web development” at that time because I was interested in learning new tech. 

I started my journey by randomly entering a year of psychology course but then I shifted to game development when I found there’s a school in the Philippines which offers game development and I just went for it since I loved gaming, computer games and console games at that time.

Wait, so you started off from a Psychology which is an arts background and then you decided to just go into game development? Why do you even choose to go uni in the first place?

Well I guess it's pretty much a requirement here in the Philippines.Because most companies won't hire you if you aren't a graduate of any four year course or it's really hard to find a job. I would say the biggest reason I actually did uni is to secure myself a job one day. 

How did you even get the idea to transition your career, four years in game development that's not a short stint you know?

I guess in a way you could call it six years of my life, since four years of school and two years of working. To be honest, the reason why I got interested in web development is because I was interested in looking for a side hustle and I was researching how to create websites and I really want to create my own website rather than using any other platforms like Shopify and Wordpress. At that time, I really  wanted to create a K-pop store for the Philippines because there are a lot of K-pop stores and i'm really interested in doing that. 

If you wanted to go into freelancing or you know making money online why didn't you go do something related to game development?

What makes it different in web development than game development is, game development's really not a one-man team. It really comprises different people ,game designers, game artists and another set of developers if you want to create a multiplayer game. But then again at that time, I could only create 2D stuff so I couldn't really think of myself going freelance game development.

What are you currently working on? Maybe you can share some of the projects that you're working on at work.

So i had a shot at working on this project called Startup Forest, it's a venture site that you can get investors,  look through ideas and also i'm working on another project called Menubase which we call this god app, it allows you to check invoices, you can add invoices and later automating the invoice processing flow. 

Cool stuff Michael, and for those who don’t know, Michael is actually our go-to-backend guy for most of our projects. What do you think about this Michael? As someone who is working on multiple projects at once.

At first it was really pressuring because you're creating two different backends which do two different things so at first it gets really confusing, but I guess documentation really is important for those two things and really remembering what each route or each function does so it was really interesting and I am learning a lot.

Maybe can you explain how you learned web development and maybe how you started your web development journey?

I learned  web development through this Hi-Po class with The Hacker Collective and I thought it  would be really hard to get into web development since I only knew a little bit because it was  taught in university. 

P.S : HiPo group is our THC’s high performance learning groups where we bring groups a small team of people together, see it like an accountability or a support group style where we have a mentor guiding these guys on their tech learning journey. 

That’s great Michael, so how's it like working fully remotely? Because you're working with us, THC, a Malaysia company and you’re in the Philippines.

At first, I thought it would be very hard to contact people since i have only just worked remotely for like six or seven months because of Covid, that time i had a hard time collaborating with a a lot of people back then in my previous work since i worked closely with the designers and also the artists. I thought i would have like a difficult experience in transitioning to a full remote work but yeah i don't think i'm having trouble right now since each and every person that that i'm working with is really easy to reach out to and they're really helpful with if i have a lot of issues regarding the devops and front end which i don't really know that much. 

A lot of people have been complaining about how Covid-19 is affecting their lives and their career right? What about yourself? What are your thoughts on, has Covid-19 affected your career?

I guess it did at first because there were a lot of transitions happening especially since we're full  onsite work or in the office. But then again, most of my work is spent on the computer rather than on paper or going out . I don't think it really matters that much but I think what really matters is how you manage your time when you're working remotely. Like when you're working remotely, you can do anything you want, you can lie down, you can play games so it really all boils down to self discipline and if you really love your job,  you can keep on exploring on issues that you're dealing with that work. 

How's the typical day like for you, working remotely as a developer?

I don't really go to work straight away the first thing in the morning, I mostly just try to keep myself awake and search for interesting stuff on YouTube and Facebook. After that I will start to handle my work that day and see if any issues or problems arise. I think the interesting part of the day for me is collaborating with the team on how to solve these problems and if they have issues too of course i help them too 

What’s the advice you can give, as a self-taught web developer, to maybe someone that’s starting his or her self-taught tech journey too?

I guess the biggest advice that I could give them is don't listen to people who say that this tech stack is bad, don't listen to people who put down the stacker you're using. As long as you really get the job done and you really understand what you're using, I think that's the most powerful thing that you could do.

Thanks for the awesome interview!

Hope you enjoyed this series!

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