My Coding Journey
Tags: webdev, career, beginners, programming
Published: 2023-02-15 15:25:35

A full circle.

Around 15 years ago one of my hobbies was to create static websites and designing layouts for both web and Livejournal (does anyone still use it?) . The layouts themselves used to be made using Photoshop, then coded using Notepad (I thought I was super fancy when upgrading to Notepad++). However all of this was just a hobby at the time and I didnt even know I could make a living making websites. I ended up taking up baking and just decided I'm going to be a pastry chef.
Being part of an Asian family, not going to uni was not an option so I chose to study Computer Science at King's College London. Unfortunately, I was extremely immature and thought of it as a waste of time when I could be working in a kitchen. My memory is a bit blurred regarding my time at uni, but somehow I was given permission to redraw 1 term before completing my degree. Needless to say a few years later this became one of my biggest regrets till this day. 

My career as a pastry chef was pretty smooth, I was good at what I did and never had trouble finding a job (if only it was the same for Web Developer jobs). When I started my career I would change jobs often in order to learn something new from each place I went. At some point, I stopped changing jobs and stayed at my current company. I was comfortable with my career and where I am in life, or so I thought. It took me far too long to realise that I was just floating and was no longer trying to be better or wanting to learn new things.

I started to learn coding in my spare time. I tried to learn Japanese, playing the piano, video editing and photography in the past but nothing stuck and I gave up easily. I thought the same would happen with coding, to my surprise the opposite happened. There was just so much to learn, I wanted to know everything.  I started with learning Python and Javascript at the same time and struggled hard. It was so different from pastry, I was basically using a whole different part of my brain and after 2 weeks I still only knew the basics and constantly got the 2 languages confused. I expected myself to give up at that point but I didn't. Since it wasn't  working out, I decided to follow a web development course to have some structure to my study and was reminded of the past me who enjoyed making websites for fun. All my HTML and CSS knowledge came back to me so I just skimmed through those tutorials and focused on Javascript. 

I am very thankful to [Trina Yau](https://www.linkedin.com/in/trinayau) for inviting me to work on our first hackathon together. It was challenging, but extremely fun - I spent around 10 hrs straight on the first day designing the UI and trying to learn figma at the same time. The saying time flies when you're having fun is cliche but so true.

It was time to move on to the next stage, leaving hospitality and entering the tech world. I started working towards learning more libraries/frameworks and creating my [portfolio](https://www.keichan.uk/) The decision was a hard one as it meant starting from the bottom again after being at the top and all the 'sorry we will not be considering you for this role' email really makes me question my life choices. Well, what did I expect? It's only been 3 months.

I won't give up.

My new life as a Web Developer has only just begun and there's so much I still need to learn. This being a dilemma of mine right now, I’m the type that likes to know everything straight away. Everyday in my head it's just What should I learn next? Vue because it's popular? Oh wait, lots of places are asking for Angular so maybe learn that instead, actually no, need to learn Typescript and SASS first. Ah but what about testing, can't forget testing etc. So yeah, my brain is just spinning constantly trying to figure out what I want to do next. In the end I decided it was important to learn Typescript first due to the high demand for it and I will be able to use it in my current project. 

I am also doing a course on UI/UX design since the design and user experience is a huge part of why I want to be a Frontend Developer. Also being able to understand a design, reasons for certain component and function etc is extremely important.

Thank You so much for reading. I would love to hear about your coding journey as well, so please share with me