Why I Called It devsforfun

The name of my company came from a three-week coding program I ran in college.

It wasn't supposed to become a company.

Back in 2023, I was selected by Google to become the lead of my college's Google Developers Student Club. It was the first time the club had existed at my college, and suddenly I had access to a bunch of other student leads from around the world.

That turned out to be more interesting than I expected.

At one of the global meetings, all of us Asian leads ended up in the same breakout room. We were exchanging LinkedIn profiles, spamming connection requests, talking shit, sharing what we were doing with our clubs.

In the middle of all that, one message caught my eye.

It was from the lead of the University of Indonesia.

I sent her a connection request and messaged her. I told her I'd noticed her message and thought it was cool. Then I asked if she wanted to do something crazy together with our clubs.

A while later, she replied.

That's where this started.

We wanted to make programming fun

Our teams got together and started throwing around ideas.

At the time, I kept seeing the same thing around me: people were struggling to learn programming. A lot of them were starting with C, and I could understand why. I had started there too.

But I didn't think it had to be that way.

I had already been programming before college. I had learned C, Python, Java, JavaScript, HTML and CSS mostly because I was curious and wanted to see what I could make.

I was that annoying kid who could sit there with a tiny Android phone and learn programming from an app because I wanted to know how the thing worked.

But even I eventually got bored with C.

There was something different about building for the web. I could write some HTML, throw some CSS at it, add JavaScript, and suddenly I had something I could actually see.

That mattered to me.

Around that time, I came across a Duke University course on programming with HTML, CSS and JavaScript. I took it even though I already knew the material, and I had a ridiculous amount of fun doing it.

That gave me an idea.

What if we taught people programming by making them build things they actually wanted to see?

That was the basic idea behind our program.

And we had another inspiration too: Buildspace.

I had spent time doing Buildspace, and I loved the way it approached learning. It wasn't built around sitting through a giant pile of lectures and hoping you somehow emerged as a builder at the end. It was about making things, sharing progress, building alongside other people, and actually shipping something.

So when we designed our program, we borrowed heavily from that model.

The website, the presentation style, the community structure, the general vibe—we took a lot of inspiration from Buildspace.

Except we wanted to use that approach to teach people how to code.

We had two names

Eventually, we needed to name the program.

There were two contenders:

devsforfun.

devsforreal.

We put them up for a vote during one of our online meetings.

I was sitting in India. She was in Indonesia with her team. Someone from the Indonesian team was sitting in what looked like a ridiculously cool café somewhere in London.

It was one of those completely chaotic online meetings where everyone is technically there to get work done, but you're also just hanging out with people from another part of the world.

Then we voted.

devsforfun won.

And honestly, I think we picked the right one.

The whole point was that people shouldn't learn programming because they were forced to.

They should get to enjoy it.

376 people signed up

We eventually launched the program.

It was officially designed to run for 21 days.

I was the teacher. The other teams helped with registrations, coordination, the community and everything around it. We ran a Discord server, gave assignments, collected updates and tried to keep people moving.

By the end, 376 people had registered.

The funny part is that I never expected 376 people to finish.

I'd already done Buildspace. I knew what happens when you give people something they have to build themselves.

Most people don't finish.

That's just reality.

Twelve people made it all the way to the end.

Six of them finished on time and made it onto our Hall of Fame.

And I wasn't disappointed.

I had expected the completion rate to be low. Maybe I thought we'd get ten or twenty people through it. Six finishing on time was lower than I expected, but it wasn't some devastating failure.

The people who did finish were the point.

I wanted to show them that programming could be something you made rather than something you merely studied.

One of my favourite assignments came from that idea.

We taught them about arrays and image manipulation by making them put dinosaurs in space.

They had images with green-screen elements and a space background. The students had to use JavaScript and manipulate the image data programmatically, working with pixels and arrays to combine everything.

It sounds ridiculous.

That was intentional.

I wanted someone learning arrays to look at the result and think, holy shit, I just made dinosaurs appear in space with code.

That's much more memorable than telling someone that arrays are an important data structure and asking them to print numbers from one to ten.

Then I forgot about the name

The program ended sometime around the end of 2024.

The name stayed around, but I didn't immediately turn it into anything.

It just sat there.

Then, on April 7, 2025, I incorporated my company.

And I picked the name back up.

That's when I realized something funny.

I hadn't really invented a company name in 2025.

I'd already named the company in 2024.

I just hadn't known it yet.

So what does "fun" actually mean?

It doesn't mean I don't take the work seriously.

Quite the opposite.

I love building software.

I especially love building beautiful websites.

To me, designing and developing software is an artistic process.

There's a weird satisfaction in taking a blank screen, figuring out what needs to exist, deciding how it should look, choosing the technology, thinking through the architecture, calculating the load, dealing with the bugs, and eventually watching the whole thing come together.

I don't look at a website and think, I'm making a website for money.

I look at it more like I'm designing a spaceship.

Someone gives me a mission.

I figure out what this thing needs to accomplish.

Then I design the machine that can accomplish it.

The technology is part of that. The design is part of that. The architecture is part of that. The tiny decisions that nobody else will ever notice are part of that.

And then there is the part where everything inevitably breaks and I have to figure out why.

That's fun too.

That's what devsforfun means to me.

It's not about doing unserious work.

It's about enjoying serious work.

I spent years working as a software engineer, and the more software I built, the more I realized that this wasn't something I wanted to do merely because it was a good way to make a living.

I genuinely like doing it.

So when I started the company, I wanted that to be part of the foundation.

We build software for clients. We build products. We work on AI and automation. We solve actual business problems.

Obviously, money matters.

But that's not the entire reason we're here.

The work should be interesting.

The thing we're building should be worth building.

The process should be something I can get excited about.

And if someone works with me on a project, I want them to feel that too. They don't have to be obsessed with software the way I am. But the process shouldn't feel like they're being dragged through some miserable technical black box.

That's the idea I started with when I was teaching those students.

I just didn't realize I was also naming my future company.

devsforfun.

That's what we do.

And yeah, we mean the "fun" part.