Got My First Developer Job

After working as a graphic designer for 8 years, and later taking online courses to learn to code for nearly two years without a computer science degree, I finally got my first developer job!

Starting from 16 August 2024, I am working for a local traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) healthcare company, with my role involves web development, UX design and graphic design. My official position in the company is marketing assistant, but if you were to ask me what my job is, I would describe myself as a developer and designer instead.

After taking online courses, including freeCodeCamp, Scirmba and CS50's Introduction to Computer Science, for more than a year, I began to hunt for web developer jobs in recent months. I tried to apply for many companies on LinkedIn, but none of my attempts succeed. There was a recruiter on LinkedIn inviting me to apply for a contract developer job, but since the office's location is far from where I live, and it is a hybrid position that requires reporting to the office occasionally, I was not qualified for the position.

In late July 2024, I received a WhatsApp message and was invited by the managing director of a local traditional Chinese medicine company to attend an interview with him. The company was looking for someone with web development expertise to work on and improve their website, which is built with WordPress. The managing director discovered my résumé on a Malaysian job hunting website. I registered on account on said job hunting website when I tried to apply for a web developer position for a Malaysian company that I discovered through LinkedIn.

During my interview, I explained to the managing director that I have been looking to switch career from graphic design to web development. Turned out, the company was also interested in hiring a web developer who knew design to improve the front end of their website, so my 8 years worth of graphic design experience was a bonus. A week after the interview, the managing director sent me a job offer, and I accepted and got hired, with my responsibilities include web development, UX design and graphic design.

Starting my professional web development journey with WordPress is going to be a new experience for me. I had brief experience with working on WordPress websites as a website administrator in one of my previous jobs, but never as a developer. Furthermore, prior to receiving this job offer, I never studied WordPress development, nor built my own website with WordPress.

That said, I hope to apply the programming knowledge and skills I learned from the coding courses I had taken to adapt to learning WordPress development. My confidence in my ability to learn new tech skills was bolstered by the time I managed to solve a problem with a hobby PHP project despite my inexperience with PHP. I am looking forward to learning more about PHP with my new job as a WordPress developer as well.

Although I work on WordPress in my day job, my own website will continue to be built with Eleventy, and I will continue to follow and support Eleventy's development. One of the reasons I wanted to pursue web development as a profession is the freedom to learn and use different web development tools outside day job while continuing to grow as a developer.

None of the coding courses I took taught about Eleventy or any static site generator, but building my website with Eleventy allowed me to learn more about web development, not to mention I do have a lot of fun with using Eleventy. Therefore, I am content to be a WordPress developer by day, Eleventy developer by night.

I am happy to be able to switch my career path to web development despite not having a computer science degree, and that my prior working experience as a graphic designer helped with getting this new job opportunity.

Since I began to seriously consider pursuing web development as a profession, I have been introducing myself as a graphic designer turned aspiring web developer, on this website and my other online presence, because I hoped to transfer my creativity and design expertise into building the web. I am glad that my such aspirations have come true.

Unfortunately, my first web development ended up lasting only four months, as it turned out, despite stating looking for someone with web development skills as the reason for inviting me for an interview and later hiring me, the company website was considered merely one part of its branding, and what my employer really wanted is a digital marketer who could wear many hats, which I should have seen coming in hindsight because my official title in the company was actually Marketing Assistant, and the company does not have a tech or IT department.

I am a web developer, not a marketer, so I decided to leave the company to continue to focus on web development, thus 3 January 2025 will be the final day of my employment in the company.

On the plus side, at least I actually got some professional web development experience, even if it lasted only a few months, since I had successfully developed a WordPress plugin for the first time ever during my first web developer job.