From International Relations to Software Engineer: My Self-Taught Path

I didn’t study computer science. I graduated with a degree in International Relations in 2022, and at the time I had no plan to become a developer.

How it started

What pulled me in was curiosity — I kept watching programmer content on YouTube, and the more I watched, the more I wanted to actually try it myself. So I started learning the same way a lot of self-taught developers do: YouTube tutorials and roadmap.sh to figure out what to learn next.

The hardest part wasn’t the material itself — it was not knowing what actually mattered. When you’re learning alone, everything looks equally important, and there’s no one to tell you which parts are foundational and which are a rabbit hole. I spent a lot of early time unsure if I was learning the right things at all.

Binar Academy: learning what matters

That’s the gap Binar Academy closed for me. The biggest value wasn’t the curriculum itself — it was having mentors who were active industry practitioners. They could tell me, directly, what actually gets used on the job versus what’s just nice to know. That kind of judgment is hard to get from tutorials alone.

Generasi GIGIH: my first real project

After that, I joined Generasi GIGIH, a remote apprenticeship program run by GoTo Impact Foundation. It combined in-class learning with a chance to join internship project, and I was selected to work remotely as a Backend Developer at Wastehub.

The project was building a waste bank application with a pickup system for communities in Bali. This was the first time I used what I’d learned to solve a real problem for real people — not a tutorial project, but something meant to actually work for a community. That shift, from “does this run” to “does this solve the problem it’s meant to solve,” changed how I think about writing software.

Moving into industry

Since 2024, I’ve been working as a Software Engineer at PT Berlian Sistem Informasi, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi Corporation, building dealership information systems used across Indonesia’s Mitsubishi dealer network.

The biggest difference from the apprenticeship isn’t the code — it’s the responsibility. What I ship now runs in production, at scale, for a network of dealers who depend on it. That accountability changes how carefully you think about every decision, not just whether the feature works.

Looking back, the path wasn’t conventional — a humanities degree, YouTube, a remote apprenticeship building for communities in Bali, and now enterprise systems for a nationwide dealer network. But each step taught me something the previous one couldn’t: curiosity got me started, mentorship taught me what mattered, the apprenticeship taught me to build for real people, and industry taught me what it means to be accountable for what I ship.