Recently, I discovered sailorhg's comic, "Home Sweet Homepage" (which also has a text transcript available), telling the author's story about growing up online in the era of GeoCities. While I never got to code my own website on GeoCities, this comic reminded me of why I love web development and web design and thus eventually decided to changed my career path to web development.
This line in the comic in particular summed it up:
Working on my website combines my love for words, art, and technology, and it's a form of self-expression for me. Computers are logical and code is logical but you can use them to express your emotions, make art, and communicate to other people.
Therefore, sailorhg's comic has inspired me to share my web development and web design origin story on this blog.
I had a GeoCities account, but by the time I started to participate on the web in the 2000s when I was around 14, blogs were on the rise, so blogging was my first foray into creating on the internet, so I did not experience creating and coding a personal website from scratch like other GeoCities users did. That said, I got my start on HTML and CSS through blogging, by editing the codes of blog themes and widgets, while being inspired by many other blogs.
Almost as soon as I began to learn HTML and CSS during my teenage blogging era in the 2000s, I was enamoured by the two languages and web design. Similar to sailorhg, I found web design and development a fascinating combination of words, art and technology.
I never consider art and science at odds with each other, because since childhood I was interested in both: drawing has been a life-long hobby of mine, but I had a childhood phase where science was my main special interest; then while I chose to study science stream subjects in secondary school, at the same time I aspired to become a graphic designer, and thus pursuing a diploma in graphic design after graduating from secondary school.
In fact, I was inspired to pursue graphic design as a profession by a Taiwanese blogger I followed during my 2000s teenage blogging era. Said Taiwanese blogger was a professional designer whose blog included a gorgeous header made with Flash. Resources for learning to code to become a professional web developer were not as accessible and easy to find as they are today, and I did not know anyone working in tech to know how to break into web design or web development field either, so I mistakenly assumed that pursuing graphic design would allow me to get involved in web design, but that ended up not being the case. Years in the graphic design field, I got burned out; there were multiple factors contributing to my burnout from the graphic design field, but the short version is that the reality of graphic design work, at least in my experience, did not turn out as great as what my younger self had expected and hoped for.
Fast-forward to 2022, my interest in web design was rekindled when I discovered Neocities and the resurgence of creating personal websites, so I decided to build and code my own website from scratch for the first time. For this, I re-learned HTML and CSS, and began to truly experience the joy of carving one's own space on the web, and the more I worked on my website, the more I learned about not only web design, but also web development, by dabbling in JavaScript.
Over time, my interest in web development evolved enough to take online coding courses, starting with freeCodeCamp, then Scrimba shortly after. Taking these courses made me realise that these languages have evolved a lot since more than a decade ago. I practised the HTML, CSS and JavaScript skills and knowledge I learned from these courses by building projects, including the Frontend Mentor challenges and my hobby websites.
Meanwhile, learning that there were people who became developers without a computer science degree inspired me to consider switching my career path from graphic design to web development. In other words, web design and development had evolved to more than a hobby to me.
I did not expect career switch to be easy, so I did put as much as I could in learning and practising web development. The process made me realise that my true passion lies in web development and web design, not graphic design. Although the design skills I learned from my experience in graphic design were helpful in improving my front-end web development skills, I would be lying if I said I do not have any regret for my past decision to pursue graphic design as a profession.
After teaching myself to code for almost two years, and received multiple code and tech-related certifications including CS50's Introduction to Computer Science, I updated my résumé with information about my interest in switching career from graphic design to web development, and hope for transferring my creativity and design expertise into building the web. I started to try hunting for front end web developer jobs, until I finally got my first developer job in August 2024.
Looking back, even I am still amazed by the fact that I managed to transition from a hobbyist to a professional web developer, especially since I did not come from a tech educational or industrial background, but I am glad that it happened.