How I Started My Web Development Journey
Read Time: 7 min read
Web Development and Programming in general is hard, but millions of people learn to code everyday. The salary is high, lot of companies and startups want different kind of developers for their businesses, be it Front-End, Back-End, QA, Full-Stack or even AI specialists which means the demand for this profession is high.
I’m a Tech, Android and Computers enthusiast for over 5 years, so I spend lot of time reading and checking many articles, tutorials and even videos about the latest Tech news, new applications and games, smart devices, you name it…
As months and years passes, I become closer and more interested in Tech in general. And with all these I was also reading some articles about coding, websites, how-to’s, etc…
Fast-Forward some years and it was late Spring, or mid May to be specific, May 10–20 2016 to be even more exact than I was! It was the time when my inner me knew that I should go into the path of Web Development as I was struggling at college with another profession which I didn’t like and didn’t learn after, but I had to finish my 3 years of college, even though I won’t look at that profession anymore as I graduated from it at June 2017 (College was from 2015–2017).
Mid May 2016 was the time I started to dig more about website building and Web Development. I remember I signed up for many major Web Dev learning platform, which includes Codecademy, Free Code Camp (FCC), Udemy and many more tutorials in between 18–21 May (Yes, I remember the dates too!).
I started to watch videos, reading articles and following the tutorials and steps found on these sites and slowly started to build some simple, not-so-good webpages, which only contained some text, numbers, lists and no styles at all. This means that I was getting the grasp of HTML relatively quickly.
My First Ever Webpage (fairly simple, no styles)
Above you see a so-simple webpage which I was proud of at the time as I was following Codecademy’s tutorial and reached my first ever checkpoint in my first days of the journey.
The summer of 2016 was the time which I learned and got good at HTML and CSS, but was too hard to learn JavaScript as I did follow a few tutorials but I couldn’t feel that I’m getting the hang of it. I couldn’t go further than this, so I got disappointed and felt like it’s not for me. As the last year of college has started, I didn’t have much time to go over it again, so it was a bad time for me from that perspective.
“It was really hard for me that I couldn’t go further and let this chance go away, because this was supposed to be the profession of my dreams!”
Christmas and New Year approached, I had a one-month vacation from college and “that” was the time when I came back to Web Development, to my good hobby, to the Profession that I wanted to do and become a pro at it. Who was my supporter to all this? Myself. It’s not that my family was against it. It’s the opposite, they were completely okay with it, but as they don’t know much about this sites and programming stuff, they were supporting from the “If you can learn it by yourself and you like it, then learn, we’ll be proud of you!” perspective.
I got excited again and got my hands dirty in code, building some layouts and webpages which were better than the previous ones, but not good compared to real-world websites (I was still a newbie at that time :D ). I’ll list few things that I built following Udemy tutorials:
Note: These websites that are built by me (and also which are awful and beautiful at the same time) are stored locally and No One has seen it before, so you are lucky to see all these. I know that newbie developers also have these kind of websites stored privately ;)
Sorry for the harshness of this image. I know that it’s a freaking bad one, it’s rough from all 4 edges but it was my first steps, first but skewed up steps :D
A dumb website done while following an Udemy tutorial (at least learned positioning certain elements to certain places. Also, changed many things myself after tutorial finsihed!)
A beautiful Resume, again followed by an Udemy tutorial that’ll hurt your eyes :D
Those were some basic websites that I did by following some tutorials and videos, but I felt like following tutorials could get boring after some time and I read elsewhere that the best way to learn Web Development, Front-End particularly, is to build projects yourself. After 2016–2017 New Year, I didn’t stop, and I’m still working on side projects till now, I learned fully HTML and most of what CSS has to offer and constantly learning what I couldn’t get at first, learned to use some frameworks like Bootstrap, Built-in CSS Grid System and Flexbox (Still learning Grid System), some SASS and LESS (Still learning too), but you noticed that I didn’t mention JavaScript here in the list, that’s because I tried again and I couldn’t get the grasp of it again, but this time I didn’t quit and focused on the above mentioned tools.
After nearly a year since I got my hands inside coding, again early May to be exact, I felt like I need to show myself to the world that I’m a Front-End Web Developer and have my online presence and learn new things constantly. I started by making a LinkedIn profile for myself, adding a Bio in most of my Socials related to my profession, but something was missing, like, where should people go to see my works and how other people show their works and impress their future boss? The answer is, having a Portfolio Website.
I thought about building a portfolio website for myself by myself to show off my works and get people to know more about my experience and skills, also so they can get in touch with me in case they want to hire me or know more about me.
The last few months of my college was so hard and exams everywhere, but I wanted badly to build my portfolio, so I made a schedule to do my studies and preparations for exams first and dedicating 30min-1hour daily at nights to get my hands dirty, but this time, not for building dummy websites, but for building my actual real Portfolio! I started nearly at mid May this year and it took me till the end of July, like, nearly 2,5 months with 30min-1hour of code every single day. Finally, I got my Portfolio site up and running online, so that anyone can see it, also I linked it to LinkedIn for ‘professional reasons’. How amazing is that!!! I was so happy about it and through the 2,5 months, I felt that I’m better now designing and building websites than first when I started (which is too normal, tbh). I know that you’re now thinking on how to find and check my portfolio, so here’s the link to my Portfolio.
Overall, I’m satisfied with how far I came till now but, I won’t stop here though. My main aim is to get the hang of JavaScript which I would like to learn when I schedule an internship for myself and hopefully there will be offers so I go and learn more and more languages after learning JavaScript.
For now, I’m part of an online challenge where I should build 30 sites based on the prompts of the day. I already completed more than half of them and I’ll hopefully finish all 30 sites in the next coming weeks or at most, months. Here’s the site where all the projects of this challenge are hosted. I should admit that this challenge has even more strengthened my knowledge of building websites and I can’t wait to reach till the end of this challenge and be happy with the final outcome.
As a conclusion, this was a brief summary of what I was up to this last year and how I reached this far in my journey to learn Web Development. I hope to get better and better in the near-future, learn more languages and frameworks, make my dream come true and apply to jobs and work as a Web Developer.
P.S: If you want a Website for yourself or for your company, startup etc. or you can provide an opportunity for an Internship (if you’re based in Armenia), feel free to send me a message from my personal website’s form and I’ll be more than happy to work with you. I’ll get in touch with you in less than a day.
Thanks for reading my first post, which was about my journey to become a Web Developer. If you reached this far, then I wish you all the success in your profession whatever you have chosen and never give up because you should do all your best, be patient and work hard if you want to achieve your goals, learn a profession and be successful at it. I wish you all the best. Have a good day.
If you liked my first post, I’ll be happy if you share this or provide some comments so I get more motivated and write more articles about my journey. Thanks for your support, I can’t wait to write more articles!
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