I have always drawn from a young age, heavily inspired by disney films. I wanted to be an animator and studied Computer Animation at a local university.
By 2016, I had been animating for 8 years, freelancing and independently working on various music video, pitches and explainer videos. I had my films shown at various festivals, both nationally and internationally and even won awards for my work. I had managed to carve out my own production timeline that worked well for me.
So why change?
It's not enough to just be good at what you do. There must be opportunities. If your skills are not in demand, then there is not much you can do to change that. For me, particular opportunities that suit my style of animation are few and far between.
However, I'm not just a creative person. I'm a maker at heart. I've never been limited to just drawing and telling stories.
I could have gone into graphic or web design or something more visual but didn't. I felt that if I was going to start over, it should be something that feels new. I'm excited by new things, and it feels like I'm pushing my abilities. I like to look back on the year and see what I have achieved.
Why web development?
- You don't need a degree to become a web developer. It's one of those career's where being self-taught isn't held against you.
- Despite what people think, coding is really creative. It involves making something useful and cool seemingly from nothing.
- The skills are in demand. There are more industries relying on coding skills for various things. I'm quite a restless person who needs to be challenged and this field of work would keep me on my toes in a good way.
- If I was going to the learn something new, I wanted it to be skills that had longevity. Web development offered that.
Learning html and CSS was quite straight forward. CSS keeps you on your toes and is moving in new directions which excites my creative side.
Flexible nature of the work. You can work from anywhere which is really appealing. This would be something I would do further down my career. Right now I want to surround myself with more talented developers so I can learn things I wouldn't normally pick up on my own.
Steps taken to become a web developer
There are a lot of resources online where you can teach yourself to code. Here are some that I used at the beginning:
Learnt how to use Bootstrap using their documentation.
I learnt how to create a WordPress theme from scratch through Brad Hussey's Udemy Course
I improved my knowledge of JavaScript with Wes Bos' JavaScript 30 tutorials.
I completed 100 days of coding at the beginning of this year, working through the following tutorials:
To improve my understanding further, I'm working through SuperHi's WordPress course. The community that had been built around the SuperHi team is really inspiring.
After being a generalist in front end web development, the next steps I plan to take will involve learning JS frameworks and possibly specialise in making engagingly animated components for software.
Wish me luck!