I Studied English, Waited Tables, and Somehow Became a Full-Stack Engineer

Taken in Montreal

中文版：

英文系到全端工程師，我的完整路線

An English major who did market development, product optimization, and waited tables at a steakhouse, and only started learning to code after graduation. Now I’m a full-stack engineer.

Hi, I’m Serena. Let me give you a quick background on myself.

I studied Applied English at a public university . During college, I did a few internships: market development at AsiaYo, a travel startup, product optimization at Shopee Taiwan, and I also waited tables at a fine dining restaurant through a school partnership. After graduating, I didn’t go down the typical path for an English major. Instead, I ended up somewhere I never expected, becoming a full-stack engineer.

The moment at Shopee that changed everything

It started during my internship at Shopee’s Cross Border department, where I worked as a Product Optimization intern. My job was to localize AI-generated product titles, converting mainland Chinese phrasing into language that felt natural to Taiwanese users, which helped with both user understanding and SEO. I also regularly pulled sales data across product categories and put together reports for my manager.

One day, I watched a coworker write a few lines of Python and finish something in a few minutes that would have taken me half an hour in Excel. It hit me: the same task, completely different tools, completely different results. That was the moment I thought, I want to be able to do that.

Teaching myself, then landing my first engineering job

After that, I started learning through a full-stack course on Udemy. I’d open my laptop whenever I had time and just work through it. About six months later, I landed my first engineering job as a frontend developer, working with designers to build and maintain client websites and develop reusable component libraries.

But somewhere along the way, I noticed something. There’s a big gap between “I learned this from a course” and “I can actually solve a problem on my own.” I knew the syntax, but when I ran into something the course didn’t cover, I’d get stuck. I didn’t just want to do frontend. I wanted to build a full product from scratch.

The problem with self-studying: too many options, not enough direction

Once I decided to go full-stack, I started researching like crazy. But the amount of resources online was overwhelming. YouTube tutorials, Udemy courses, roadmaps everywhere, and every single one seemed important. On top of that, new AI tools were popping up constantly, and I kept getting distracted trying to figure out which framework or tech stack to focus on instead of actually learning. The bigger issue was that I never built anything real, so I had no idea how to turn what I was learning into an actual product.

Finding what worked for me: joining WeHelp

What drew me to it wasn’t that everything was laid out for me. It was actually the opposite. WeHelp expects you to figure out most things yourself. There are weekly checkpoints to hit, and while the first two stages come with some guidance, the third stage is completely self-directed. You come up with your own project idea and build it. The instructors will flag major issues, but how you get there is entirely up to you. That might sound painful to some people, but for me it was exactly what I needed. I didn’t want to follow along anymore. I wanted to practice solving problems independently.

During the program, I built two full-stack projects on my own: PetHealth, an AI-powered pet health management system, and Taipei Day Trip, a travel e-commerce platform with payment integration. I handled everything, from database design, API development, and frontend UI, to AWS deployment. There were plenty of problems along the way, like a Docker memory leak and a cloud database expiring and breaking the connection, but every time I fixed something, I felt like I’d actually moved forward. More than the technical stuff, what mattered most was that I finally built something that came from my own ideas and my own needs.

More than just writing code: coffee chats and mock interviews

After finishing the program, I also made a point to do coffee chats and mock interviews.

Writing code is something you do alone, but coffee chats gave me a chance to talk to people already in the industry, to understand what the work actually looks like day to day and what kinds of problems engineers are really solving. Mock interviews helped me practice explaining what I’d built. Not just “I used this technology,” but “here’s the problem I was solving, here’s how I thought about it, and here’s why I made that call.”

For me, talking to senior engineers and people in the field is one of the fastest ways to figure out what you’re doing well and where you need to improve. Before WeHelp’s 7th cohort Demo Day, I set up a coffee chat with a senior engineer to do a practice run. The feedback helped me figure out what to improve, and they also pointed out things I wouldn’t have caught on my own, like interview technique and small details I tend to overlook.

Landing a job isn’t just about the technical skills. It’s about letting people know who you are.

I’m now a full-stack engineer with experience in Next.js, TypeScript, Python/FastAPI, PostgreSQL, AWS deployment, and AI integration.

From Applied English major to waiting tables to writing code, it wasn’t a straight line. Looking back, the technical skills are learnable. But getting people to know you, trust you, and give you a shot, that takes practice too.

If you’re in the middle of a career change or feeling lost while self-studying, don’t just keep your head down and code. Go talk to people. Let them see what you’re building. We might not have the same answers, but maybe we can help each other skip a few wrong turns.