And I became a front-end developer
One day I thought, “why not learn some new languages?” and decided to begin a career change from language specialist to front-end developer.
After being lecturer in communication at my alma mater, proofreader, homeschool educator and translator, it may seem to be quite a change of career — and that’s what I once thought as well — but it’s not so different.
languages == languages
All my work life has always been revolving around languages, I’ve always worked with words, conventions about writing them, syntax, grammar logic and so on. I know exactly what a misplaced comma can lead to. “Let’s eat, Grandma” and “Let’s eat Grandma” carry very different meanings, one with far more tragic consequences than the other.
Coding is fairly similar. A misplaced semicolon can hurt your webpage pretty badly, some syntactic rule not followed and your code goes astray, a faulty conditional statement and the computer can’t understand what you meant. Logic, syntax and semantics are as crucial in coding as they are for conventional languages.
<button>Back to school</button>
It had been a while since I was in school full-time when I enrolled for Technigo’s boot camp in front-end development. I wasn’t afraid: I have an open mind, I love to learn and I learn fast, I always liked to study, I crave to learn new things and most importantly, I wanted to do this career shift. So after sending my application, I was happy but felt no stress when I got this “we’ve selected you” in my inbox. Business as usual.
if(completed === “8 weeks”) {reflect on those weeks}
After one third now completed (yeah!), I can say that I learned an incredible number of things — apart from the obvious HTML structure, CSS styling and JavaScript functions — such as accessibility in Web development, Agile methodology, unit testing and pair programming. My schedule is packed with coding yes, but also lectures, coding sessions, readings, practices, team sessions, demos… And when I have some free time*, I can laugh a little at me who thought ingenuously that it would be a smooth ride. As if such a roller coaster ride could be smooth (my stomach has never been a fan of amusement parks)!
Right from the start, I strongly felt that I would be good at this: I am structured, detail-oriented, I like solving problems, I like to create things. I now need to be confident enough to affirm it here:
I am a good front-end developer and I am becoming better week after week.
I must admit that the impostor syndrome made it very hard for me to write it here, but hey, I will leave it as it is! I love what I am doing and I am doing it as well as possible.
border-radius: 50%;
To round it off, I am looking forward to the next 16 weeks before graduation and I am happy that I was naive enough to enrol myself for this boot camp! Let’s go back to code now…
*I have a vague memory that it exists, but I haven’t experienced it so much in the last two months…
