Finally, Wisp/s Is Live

A write up about my story to become a Web Developer.

Here it is. My own blog. A result after many weeks of reading, learning and writing (notes). Coding this blog has been especially great to learn and understand 11ty. An (completely not opinionated) awesome Static Site Generator.

I will write a separate blog post about the road to this website. For those that are interested, I would like to to share a short story about how I got here.

Working in the hospitality industry was great. Until I got stuck at home during the corona pandemic. Like many.

While being positive at first, -it won't last as long right?- it was, at times, a tough period. Although I could work on freelance projects, I was depressing to stay at home. Waiting for regulations to ease up, turned into a disappointment several times.

I've lost my source, but the simple notion of "you have two choices" was my turning point. It's pretty simple. I could either:

Keep "wasting" time and feel bad about it.

or

Make the best out of it.

I asked myself, which skill did you always desire to master, but never took the time to learn to? The simple answer was "making websites". So was running a half-marathon, but that's a story for another time I guess.

I've fumbled, not too serious, with many web-builders such as 'Wix' and 'Squarespace'. I ended up at WordPress.

WordPress was a great place to start. I grasped the basics and started playing around with different themes. It didn't take long untill, a sort-of-to-be, affiliate marketing website was live. I was very proud of it and learned some basics of SEO, Keyword Research and writing along the way.

Looking back on it, the site was nothing special at all. But there is something special about your first.

I'm curious about your first "special first". Whether it's websites or your first guitar solo. Let me know!

Over time, it didn't take long for many issues to arise. The site appeared incorrectly on mobile devices, gave random errors, and above all... was slower than an average snail.

Furthermore, it was difficult to make custom adjustments to my chosen theme. I mean, the theme support taught me the dreaded !important but hey it worked! Not to forget the reliance on many plugins with each of their issues.

Concluded I had no clue how the website actually worked and unplugged the site.

The great thing above the above rant? A new passion was born!

I concluded that it's essential to understand and read the code behind a website.

First I bought a 10 euro 'Web Development Bootcamp' on 'Udemy'. For those interested it was this one by Colt Steele (not affiliated). Another great source i've extensively used is FreeCodeCamp.

I'd recommend both, but I dont think anything can beat the amount of value that you can get for totally free from FreeCodeCamp.

I've used many more sources during the months, but I'll save those for another time. So that they suit a better purpose explaining the topic and get the attention they deserve.

For all of you that feel terribly overwhelmed when starting the web development reading journey.

I feel you.

I've been there. I still am. There is so much to learn and so many different technologies. It's hard to choose. So I felt it totally deserved it's own post.

Fast forward, this website is, one of the, results of my journey so far. I've learned a lot about HTML, CSS and JavaScript. But there is much more to dive into.

I'd like to think that I'll be forever a beginner. And that's completely fine.