Narenda Wicaksono had a decision on his desk that most people would call a gift. His employer, a multinational, was offering him a Southeast Asia developer-relations role that, by his account, could have doubled or tripled his income. He had spent more than eight years in developer relations at Nokia and Microsoft. He also had a wife and two children.
He said no, and went the other way. In a March 2015 interview with DailySocial, he admitted what frightened him: whether he could keep his children in school if the salary stopped. He settled it, he said, by deciding that only God can guarantee a person's life, so his job was to give his best.
DailySocial, which published his interview, disclosed that it was an investor.
What pulled him was the developers he had met. Through his work he had mentored everyone from students to experienced engineers and seen talent in cities far from Jakarta. Distance from the capital and the language barrier held many of them back. "I couldn't leave my fellow Indonesian developers," he told the interviewer.
Dicoding launched in Bandung on 5 January 2015 with two co-founders: Kevin Kurniawan, a former Nokia developer-experience colleague, and Akbar Hidayat, a freelance software developer. About 500 developers joined soon after. DailySocial, which published his interview, disclosed that it was an investor.
The early years were built on events and challenges. In 2016 the government's creative-economy agency made it an event partner, and it became a Google Developers Authorized Training Partner. In 2017 learners could pay through Bukalapak and Tokopedia. In 2018 Google and Dicoding ran 1,000 Picodiploma scholarships. Between 2015 and 2018 it held 630 offline events.
The people stories are the proof. Soesapto Joeni Hantoro, a Yogyakarta graduate, won competitions through Dicoding challenges and in 2018 was invited to LINE Developer Day in Tokyo. Junia Firdaus, a motorcycle-taxi driver, won a scholarship and finished an Android Developer Expert class in 86 days.
By early 2019 about 140,000 developers from 454 cities had joined. That was the dream he had stated in 2015: "turn Indonesian developers into world-class developers."
The quiet lesson is in the pay cut he accepted. He did not leave a job to chase an idea. He left to serve people he already knew, which is a much sturdier reason.