Diving into the investment world as a Programmer
Tags: career, computerscience
Published: 2021-05-17 17:22:54

Im a graduate in Diploma of Computer Science from Universiti Teknologi Mara (UiTM) in Malacca, Malaysia. In 2010, I started my freelance web development journey after graduation and developing wordpress sites as well as app development from scratch (I was using CodeIgniter back then). Started my first coding job at Webqlo Sdn Bhd, a web development company. I had been doing lots of coding, and lots of projects within the 4 years of my time in there. After that I venture back into my own entrepreneurship. 


### Developing ECF Platform
When my journey in entrepreneurship are taking a downturn and in dire need to stabilize my funds, I joined 1337 Ventures Sdn Bhd (a.k.a Leet Ventures) on July 2019. Leet Ventures is a venture capital firm, located in Kuala Lumpur. The company received [Equity Crowdfunding Licence](https://www.sc.com.my/bm/pembangunan/digital/list-of-registered-recognized-market-operators) by [Securities Commission Malaysia](https://www.sc.com.my/) around that time. My main role in the company is to develop the ECF platform which is now called [Leet Capital](https://leet.capital). 


### Starting my Journey to Investment World
In order for me to better develop the system for the platform, (*aside from the codes of course*). I definitely need to know about **Investing** which at that time im just a beginner, I dont even have a CDS account if I want to buy some stocks. Yeah, beats me. I didnt even know which stock should I buy and how to even look at the stock charting.

Investment has been an interesting topic for me ever since I join the company. From what I know, investment are all about putting your money somewhere and let it work for you, and you need a LOT of money to invest in order to make more money, that is my initial basic understanding for investment. Apparently **Leet Ventures** has been organizing many type of events that helped me learn on the sides. I now know that you dont require lots of money to invest, in stocks, you can get started to invest real cheap. some stock price can cost as low as RM0.10 per share. (*it comes with a risk though*)

One of the notable event that upgrade my understanding of investment is the **Accelerator Bootcamp**. People can participate in the bootcamp to learn about how to pitch their business to the investor. Starting from the idea, making a biz plan with lean canvas, what to take into consideration when doing pitch to investors, and finally receive investment funds. I learned about pre-seed, series A, Series B, equity, etc2. phew, that was a world I never come across into, eventhough I am entrepreneur myself (*well, solopreneur*)

### Challenge to develop ECF Platform
Well, the platform development was started from scratch. Begin with the POLC method (*my way of managing project*), I do the stack selection, which is LAMP. Obviously choosing **Laravel** as the base because of the robust out of the box libraries and well documented framework to kickstart the project. Yep, you guess it right (*if you are guessing*). It wasnt just pure PHP, its a mix of `Laravel` + `vanillaJS` + `VueJS` + `ReactJS` + `webpack` and much more. With multiple component, multiple features, and multiple many more `FrontEnd` and `BackEnd` stuff cz a lot has happen since version 1.  

Since this is an investment platform, MySQL wasnt the best when it comes to performance, so MariaDB is the choosen one. 

The most challenging part wasnt the choosing of stack, but the whole ecosystem process. Trust me, investment system is simple at first, it gets trickier as the progress unfold.

Another notable investment knowledge I learned when developing this ECF system is that, there is generally 3 types of investor.

1. **Retail Investor**
A person, (anyone) who has extra money that can invest up to RM5,000.00 belong to this type.

2. **Angel Investor**
A person who is a High Net Worth Individual, those who have wealth up to RM 3 million.

3. **Sophisticated Investor**
An entity who has annual income more than RM400,000. VC is one of the example for this type.


### My Final Thought
Becoming an investor was never reachable until recently. I started to explore stocks on Bursa Malaysia, learned about Techical Analysis, Fundamental Analysis, also about Startups, due diligence when deciding to invest in a company, and many more finance stuff. Which has bring and impact to the way I look at **funds**. 

Investment wasnt just about stock, there is ECF, P2P, Robo Advisor, Fix Deposit, Crypto, and more!

Being a pioneer developer for [**Leet Capital**](https://leet.capital) ECF platform has brought change to me in a great way. A change that transforms me from just an ordinary coder to the **coder who invest**. It sure is one of my turning point on achieving better financial desicion.