About a year ago during the pandemic, I was sitting in my car waiting for my wife to finish a checkup with our newly born son (at the time only one of us could go inside the hospital). I was browsing through YouTube and came across a video that said "How I Learned to Code - And Got a Job in Less Than 3 Months," a title which makes me chuckle now, but it captured my curiosity. The idea of being able to teach myself “coding” fascinated me, so I watched more videos and started reading more, and I became obsessed with teaching myself web development. I had designed/built websites before with builders and I loved the idea of being able to do it by hand with code; plus it would be a career change doing something I enjoyed, as well as supporting my new family better.

So I jumped in, starting with a book written in 2005 about HTML and CSS, which was interesting since so much of it was outdated, but it was so simple that I blew through all 400 pages in a weekend with no problem. Then I found LearnCode.Academy's video that laid out a roadmap for developers which was incredibly helpful as I didn't know exactly where to start. Then my journey really began, and over the course of the next year I learned fundamentals of JS, compilers like SASS, libraries such as GSAP and Scrolltrigger, and most recently React JS. I've built a few websites over the time I've been learning web development, but I wanted to start this blog to document some of the newer projects I'll be working on for my portfolio. The first will be a web app for film photographers who want to develop their own film and need to keep track of their developing times; should be fun!

I'll also be posting about other random dev and tech stuff, such as tools, tricks, maybe even some mechanical keyboard stuff 🤓 Hope you'll stick around to see what comes next!