My Journey from Designer to Developer

I feel that there was never such a great time to start your coding journey as today. So many great resources that can help you on your way to become a great developer, that someone "me…" might even struggle to find where to start…

Arts, Design, Dreams… and So Much More

I am anything but a rational person. I love dreams, I love the joy of childlike happiness that sprouts out of the carelessness to what is and what is not possible. I always struggled to be grounded and never felt like things should be feared. I started a company, with no remorse for what I wanted to do, how I wanted to do it… I just wanted to see what it's like. "Not as fun as it seemed, to tell the truth…"

I have one life, that was made possible thanks to the smallest chance in the universe. I always felt that lady luck stands by my shoulder, and for that I am grateful. But with the thought of all the things that had to happen for me to sit here in my chair and to write these words, that for some strange reason do mean something. The real chance of me existing is so small, that I can't even comprehend it... And this realization gave me so much joy.

I just have to try as many of these things in our world as I can. That's the simple thing that sits in my mind every day and which makes me pursue one thing after another.

One of those joys, that settled down in my all so chaotic mind, was coding…

Magic

If you are versed in the world of Anime - first off, I salute you, as you are a person of culture. But recently the anime "Witch Hat Atelier" came out. It's a lovely show that stars a little girl who loves magic so much, that even in spite of the whole world telling her that only special people can use it, never did it waver her love towards it. And when she came to know that there is a way that she too can use magic, as can anyone else, she found her spark of joy, of wonder and much more. "Even if at grief cost."

Thanks to this show, I found my spark of these feelings too - nowhere else than in code itself.

In a sense, it was magic for me as well. Me being lazy and, in my own mind, not the sharpest - I felt like I was never going to be able to do coding myself.

Every Bad Choice Makes a Good Lesson

How wrong I was, I found out only thanks to the aforementioned company. As I figured out that I really needed to do something to make some money for the minimum cost of running the company, I thought to start making websites. I know some amount of design. I know how to host and use software. It would be easy, right?

Well, it was… I could use a great tool like Webstudio to make websites with no knowledge of code. And it worked at the beginning. Dragging blocks, editing values and going through all the struggle of figuring out what does what. I made a website for our company. Was fun… Was looking awful… But I felt happy. I made a website myself, and it had a purpose…

By some magical chance - "as I said, lady luck is always standing by when it comes to my life…" - I got some clients and made some websites as a real job. I got some money and I started to dig in a bit more.

Systems vs. Nice Pages

My uncle, as it turned out, was starting his own company that needed something quite different. The website he wanted had to have courses and some more dynamic parts, and right then and there I knew I would need something other than making all the pages by hand and updating them every other day when something changed. Hence, I came around to CMS. Having some previous experience with WordPress from school, I found out that I could use it as a headless CMS to control the content of the page. Found out I would need to use some plugin and that I would need to pay a subscription for almost basic features. Ran away…

Then, after trying many different open-source projects, I found Payload. Such a great tool. So easy to get started with and it did exactly what I needed. Except… Now I was back in VS Code… Looking at some runes laid out beforehand and lost among many colorful words.

Thanks to the power of AI - something that would become my greatest enemy yet - I was able to use Payload for my needs. Even if my knowledge of what I was doing was very limited…

Skip some time forward… The MongoDB incident happened, and many supply chain attacks came after… To this day, I'm clutching my hands, praying and hoping that I did everything as I should and that all the work I made for others was not touched by this… - "First night of my life where I had zero sleep... And yes... it felt awful... a lot!"

Realization

By this time I was still working at a company as a graphic designer and all of these were my free time endeavors… And slowly but surely, I began to feel that I'm not happy with myself. Not happy with the work that I do. Not happy with my company - which came from an impostor-like syndrome and the feeling that I don't know what I'm doing…

All this pushed me over the edge. At this point I just wanted to know how. I wanted to be able to make things I want. I just felt like I wanted to find out how to use the colorful runes from VS Code to my advantage.

Hence came the time for me to learn… And thanks to many well-placed ads over YouTube videos, joined by my desire to force a very good-looking magical bear with a mesmerizing hat to send me a coin from across half of the world, I just had to start my journey on boot.dev.

May the Journey Begin

In short - Boot.dev is an amazing place. I just could not thank Lane enough for making these courses. I myself, as I said, am lazy and easily distracted. Yet the thought of being first on the monthly leaderboard and the joy from thought of receiving a letter from a different continent made me stick with the code.

For that I'm grateful, in a way I cannot express the sheer amount of joy and wonder I got from this.

Now I have some basic knowledge of how to code. I have the means to create the things I wanted to make into reality. Since I started on Boot.dev, I fully switched to Linux - here comes thanks to DHH and his awesome project Omarchy. This made me switch most of my work to the terminal, and I can't get enough of it.

I now use many awesome projects, a great number of which are open-source. Things like Neovim, Tmux and so much more. I'm looking forward to making some posts about them. I think more people should know about all the greatness there is to find in the ocean of great tools made by even greater people.

With that said... Thank you all. You made my life vibrant. And as childish as this post may look - just know that I simply found my joy in life, and finally figured out what I want to do.

I want to make things for others and to help others grow. As many of you unknowingly showed me yourselves, there is joy and wonder in using this magic of ours - to make the world a better place, and to push for a better and much more vibrant future.