My first year as a Front-End Developer | The Monthly Log #4
This month I celebrated my first year working as a web developer (🥳), after switching careers from digital marketing, and I wanted to write a little review to reflect on what has happened over the year.
To give a bit more context, the switch happened last April but it had been years in the making as I started learning to code back at Uni (15 years ago) and since then, I always built websites for friends and my own projects on the side but I never thought this could actually be my job.
Back in 2020, thanks to the various lockdowns, I found the time and motivation to develop my coding skills by learning Javascript and starting to learn React. Fast forward to April 2022 - I started a new job as a Front-end developer & designer for a SaaS.
There’s quite a lot I could talk about from this past year but I thought I’d focus on 5 main areas:
Work-life balance
This was one of the main reasons I wanted to change career. After working over 10 years in digital marketing and social media, where it never stops and you’re always switched on, I wanted to move to a job that would give me a better work-life balance. Web dev definitely does that - no overtime work and above all no weekend work anymore!
Personal projects
Until last year I always thought that my coding skills would only benefit my side projects and although I did make money building websites for people from time to time, I never thought this would become my main gig - but it did!
Being able to switch off in the evening and not having to work over the weekends at all also gave me more headspace to work on more of my own projects. I managed to launch a couple of web apps - moody and Staredown. I also found the time to start building Framer templates over the past few months, which I even started making money from.
Learnings
On the downside, although I did a lot of learning before getting the job I feel like I got a bit too comfortable and stopped gaining more skills (other than what I had to learn on the job). This is why I got back into learning React this month and I’ve also started working on a new project to learn how to use APIs. I need to start thinking ahead and keep building my skill set.
Design
This was actually a bit of a surprise to me but I totally fell in love with UI design over the past few months. I always liked drawing or making good looking websites for my projects but this year I really got into learning what makes a good and functional design. This also led me to learn both Figma and Framer on a deeper level to design and build templates to sell.
Overall
Overall, taking coding more seriously and making it my job is the best decision I could have ever taken. On many occasions I though it was too late for me and I was too far in my current career to make a change but all of this is actually not true. The best moment to start is now.
THIS MONTH I CREATED..
moje
This month I worked on a new version of my personal website on Framer and decided to turn it into a template. This one was designed to make it as easy as possible for you to add your work, projects, stack and contact details to launch your portfolio website in a couple of hours.
Get the template here →
NEXT MONTH, I WILL..
I’m trying to reduce the amount of projects I’m working on at the same time so this month I’ll focus on:
Launching the new version of my personal website - I’ve already built this on Framer (and turned it into a template) but I challenged myself to code it from scratch.
Designing and building 2 new Framer templates - a free one and a paid one.
Giving Frameplate a much-needed redesign - I built this website in a weekend so now I want to spend some time on improving the design and the user experience.
CURRENTLY, I’M..
📘 Reading:
Ghost In The Wires, by Kevin Mitnick - a fascinating story from one of the most famous hackers. I haven’t read enough to talk about it more but I’m already hooked.
🎧 Listening:
Sunsleeper by Barry Can’t Swim - I’m currently starting all my work sessions with this to get me in the zone. Certified bangers!
📺 Watching:
I just finished watching Shrinking on Apple TV - a fun watch and also great for anyone feeling nostalgic about the “How I Met Your Mother” days.
COOL SH*T
Arc.net - I finally got access to that this month and I’m yet to have fully switched to it but I’m loving the experience so far!
rectangles.app - visualise how much of your day has already gone. When you’re procrastinating and need a kick to make a start, this does the job very well :)
uicolors.app - a very handy Tailwind CSS colour generator that gives you a nice scale of colours to build your own colour palette.
Thanks for reading this log - you can find the previous ones here if you fancy checking them out. And if you liked this post please consider sharing it :)
You can also follow my journey on Twitter where I share updates regularly and sign up for my newsletter to get the next Monthly Log in your inbox.
See you in the next one 🫡