Hey there 👋🏽
My name is Conrad. I have been developing for 3 years now and I thought that this would be a good time to sit back and reflect on my journey. Hopefully you can learn something from this or find a new perspective in your own journey from reading my story. Enjoy! 😀
In the summer of 2019, one of my best friends asked me if I wanted to learn how to program and write code. He and another friend of his had goals of starting their own consulting/development business and asked if I wanted to be a part of it. At that time I was working at my uncle’s moving company delivering furniture for interior designers. It was a small local company that had about 10 employees total. We were a tight knit group that somehow made moving furniture fun on somedays. On other days however, I would come home stressed and exhausted from dealing with customers and moving 500lb dressers all day, which in turn it was difficult to consistently live a healthy lifestyle. I knew I didn’t want to do this for the rest of my life and wanted to find something that I truly enjoyed as a career. So in the beginning of December 2019 I decided to quit my job at my uncle’s moving company to join my friend and pursue software development.
I began learning Javascript on January 1st, 2020. Everyday I would watch a bunch of YouTube videos and tackle Udemy courses. I would watch/study 3 to 4 hours of material a day and applied what I learned little by little at the end of each learning session. To be honest, I really had no idea what I was getting into and the learning curve was incredibly difficult for me. The reasons being is my mind wasn’t trained to think like a developer. I had no clue what Git Hub, VS Code, or even what Javascript was. I didn’t understand the order of events in which the code is built/deployed. I didn’t understand how to debug code and isolate certain problems. I truly hated my job enough to quit and make a change to try something new.
After 3 months of having my hand held and frying my brain everyday, I finally started getting the hang of things. The code started making sense, I could debug things quicker, I could write my on logic. Things just started to come in to place.
Our first real-world application we built out was a donation management platform for an organization that donates used furniture and goods to underprivileged children. The tech stack we used was handlebarsjs, jquery, mongodb and expressjs. Working with a client and building something that someone wants to use was very intimidating and challenging. Intimidating because it was our first real-world application. Challenging because we ran into more problems/edge cases we weren’t accustomed to with just developing the local/simple applications we have been writing. We worked with the donation company for about 5 months and went our separate ways.
My first project was a huge learning experience. In response to that experience, I decided to learn Typescript and React for all upcoming projects. Since my first project, I have written a lot of code and built out a lot of fun things. From a machine-learning application to NFT minting applications I have learned and built a lot of different things in a short amount of time. I am always looking to build and learn something new, in fact, I have found a new love for crypto and Web3 and have been learning how to create decentralized applications over the past year or so.
Today, we are launching an application we have been reworking for about 7 months now. This is the first application we’ve built with a large number of users. To think that we built something that is actually providing value for people is still mind blowing to me
My journey as Frontend Developer had a lot of expected and unexpected things I knew getting into this field with no prior development experience and not much guidance would be difficult at first. I knew that I would learn so many different things and I am still learning as I write this article. However, I didn’t know that I would love it as much as I do now.