Why I Fell in Love With Web Development
Sometimes it’s easy to lose sight of the why of what we do. Maybe we started off with inspiration and lost it somewhere along the way. Because other things came up. Because life demanded it. Because money was offered. Because we wanted to promote a certain appearance. This happened to me in my journey to learn web development and I feel that it’s important to reconnect with why I do this and why I started.
I started developing websites when I was a kid at 7 years old. I learned HTML through Neopets in order to build guild pages and with the help of my dad, I ended up building and hosting a website with pure HTML and inline styling. He helped me with the hosting — I wrote the code. What motivated me then was the same thing that motivates me now — beauty. Creativity. Play. I just wanted to make something that was my own. Something colorful and pretty. It’s a rather simple desire — and the same simple desire to create beautiful spaces for people motivates me now.
What sparked my interest in getting back into web development as an adult (who had not kept up with the growth of it) was coming across a beautiful website and following it to its designer, who had an amazing portfolio of sites. I saw that she owned her own business and did branding for small entrepreneurs. She was living a life that struck me as a dream for me to live as well. But in my pursuit of that dream, I lost sight somewhat of what sparked it in the first place.
I started in a good place. Immediately after getting inspired, I took Codecademy’s Build Websites From Scratch course where I learned to build mobile responsive websites from scratch with flexbox. This course to this day is responsible for the majority of my front end skills. But afterwards I didn’t know what to do to make myself marketable, so I decided a coding boot camp would provide me with a way forward. I know many people who did the same. For some, it’s worked out and for some it hasn’t. I attended Flatiron School’s online software engineering program and completed it in a year. I built full stack applications in Rails, a Ruby CLI, a Sinatra app, and a React and Redux application. By the end I hardly recognized myself because I was pulling from an API and storing data in a Redux store. One year prior, I would have said, “what the f does that mean?”
But the truth is this school primes you to be a software engineer. I don’t regret it or any of the skills that I now have because I have used them and will likely continue to. In my previous job I built the front end of a product and static site in Vue.js and VueX. Without my React and Redux education, I could never have done that. And I love Vue. I hope I get to develop with it again. But in my heart of hearts, I am just someone who wants to build beautiful websites, whether they’re built in Vue, React, or from scratch. I am not someone who wants to get deep into engineering. There’s a part of me that grew to feel I had something to prove — I wanted to identify with the term “engineer”. I didn’t want to be belittled for sticking more to the surface layer of web development. I wanted to demonstrate that I have a logical mind — and I do — , but creative work is what makes me happy and there’s plenty of logic happening in front end code without having to go overly deep into a ton of other technologies.
I hadn’t forgotten my dream entirely. While I was job searching, I had determined that I should work at a digital agency where you are constantly working on new projects for clients, somewhat like freelancing, but with a group of experienced developers and designers who can help you grow. But my job search went on for months with rejection after rejection, and my needing to be remote made options sometimes feel more limited. I couldn’t go without a paycheck any longer, so I sort of gave up and gave into going the product engineering route. And I quickly became unhappy. More than unhappy, it actually broke down my spirit because I was out of alignment.
Sometimes finding the little place where you fit in this world is difficult. It’s difficult as well when you have bills to pay. But it’s worth attempting. I don’t intend to give up on web development — I just have to learn to accept that what works for me is ok. It’s not less than. And there may be fewer places that fit, but when something does, it will feel right. I will be doing the “why”. And that’s what counts.
