My coding journey

How I caught the bug.

I'm a self-taught programmer. I've had no formal education around the subject, everything I know I learned by watching hours of tutorials, getting stuck in and making tons of mistakes. Likewise, I still have loads to learn, but the past 18 months have been both a frustrating and fulfilling journey that has broadened my mind and way of thinking.

I work in the tech industry, not as a developer, but as a designer. I design the screens that the developers build. Although it's not necessary for a designer to learn how to code, it's a great skill to have as I'm able to communicate better with developers and be able to understand their needs and concerns. Knowing how to code has definitely made me a better designer.

My coding journey started accidentally, I had always wanted to know how to code, but I never prioritised it. It was around 18 months ago on my birthday, I had received a Raspberry Pi 4 as a gift. I didn't know what to do with it. It sat on my desk for a few weeks. When I finally got around to figuring out what to use it for, I realised the options were limitless.

I could use it as a Bluetooth speaker, a personal computer, even program it to be my own Amazon Alexa. In the end, since I was running out of hard drive space, I had decided to build my own NAS.

I found a step-by-step tutorial online and went to work. It was then that I realised I enjoyed the art of programming. Typing in some code and seeing something happen at the other end was exciting.

I was hooked.

After building my NAS, I turned my focus to learning how to build websites and applications. I had always wanted to know how to build a website from scratch, and now that I caught the bug, I went straight to work again.

I realised that the development of a website can be broken down into two fields, frontend and backend. Since I naturally gravitated towards design, it made sense for me to tackle the frontend first.

I focused on the basics. I was understanding HTML and managed to get to grips with CSS. Just when I thought I was getting the hang of it, I realised that neither were actual programming languages. The real work started when decided to get stuck in with vanilla JavaScript.

After spending a few months getting comfortable with vanilla JavaScript, I was able to learn other frameworks such as React and Next.js. I can now say that I'm somewhat comfortable with frontend programming. Of course, I still have a long way to go, but I'm able to design, build and deploy a simple application.

I've now turned my focus to backend programming. I know that if I want to build a great app, I need to be able to fuse both the front-end and back-end together. Fortunately, I don't need to learn another language, the MERN stack (MongoDb, Express, React and Node.js) is written all in JavaScript, making the transition from front-end to back-end a lot simpler.

I'm actually watching a few tutorials on it now and have a project that I'm working on in parallel. I find that I learn better by doing, so I'm trying to build an application that utilises databases, authentication as well as API calls.

Similar to front-end programming, I'm hoping I can say that I'll be comfortable with back-end programming in a few months time. I've been here before, I'm positive that I'll get there soon.