How an advertising designer taught himself code, learned on the job and started working as a web developer 

Watch the full interview here : 

In this episode of Stories of Hackers, we talked with Julio, who was previously an advertising designer but then he changed his career by teaching himself how to code and now working as a web developer! We hope you guys can learn some new insights from Julio’s story, enjoy!

Hey, can you share with our community about your background? And how you started this journey.

Hey guys, my name is Julio. I'm a self-taught developer so I started my journey around two years ago two or three years ago and how I discovered my passion for programming is because of this one time, I got a client project where I was supposed to use wordpress to build . The client like to change a lot of things and complain if something is broken, that was the moment when i started to think about getting into programming, especially web development

I took an advertising design course in my uni where I learned how to “con” people legally. I have always been interested in design but what I'm not interested in is graphic design, which is two different things. Advertising and graphic design are two very different things but for some reason  maybe it's a Malaysia or Southeast Asia thingy, they're somewhat connected together in a way that people don't know the difference.

Can you share with us a little bit about what advertising design is all about?

Advertising as I mentioned earlier, it's like learning how to “con” people but not really in a bad way. We’re just making something that you don't need, become something that you need. Advertising design is not about design as in a graphical design, in a sense, copy writing is part of advertising design actually and also persuasive talk is also part of advertising design.

Maybe can you share with us a little bit of your journey after you finished your degree?

After I finished my uni, I ventured into web designing and into wordpress, webflow. I realized there’s a lot of limitations on those platforms. Yes, you can do a lot of creative stuff with it, maybe for a simple project, I strongly recommend  using something like webflow,  but for a more complicated website, you really need to develop it from scratch.

So how I started learning to code is, there’s this freelance project where the client required me to create a website with Wix as they already purchased the Wix premium plan. With Wix, there’s actually this thing called Editor X in it which allows you to use code in it and I realised that I actually enjoy coding a lot. The final product turned out well and the client loved it. From there, I started to learn more about coding and become a self-taught developer later on.

What was your learning journey like? In terms of coding.

As a web developer,  HTML and CSS is not a programming language,  but a markup language. That’s the easiest part but for JavaScript, it’s like another new world.  When I started learning about JavaScript, I didn't really know much about it. In uni, we have called this web design courses which we use a few of jquery last time I didn't even know JavaScript at all and I thought jquery was part of JavaScript and then I tried to implement jquery in a JavaScript project only to realize it's just a library. The first few weeks of learning javascript is like you're trying to move a mountain but once you understand everything, the amount of knowledge that you can get within a short amount of time is much higher and easier.

Were you working when you were learning or you quit your job and you were learning full-time?

No, I learned while working with my job making the wordpress blog. When I started working, it's actually the start of the pandemic and most of the time it was work from home for me. My first project required me to do a landing page for Durex Singapore and there’s some requirements they wanted for their website which at that time I was not too familiar with. But  I'm good at googling for the solution and still managed to do it. That was the point that got me really thinking to learn as much as I can about coding. The first few months, my workload was a bit low and I got some extra free time after my job to do some self-learning. 

What’s the learning resources that you used in your learning journey? 

Well, of course I googled like everybody does, I followed YouTube and I realized it didn't work as some of the YouTube tutorials are just bad and outdated. So I decided to purchase a course by Dev Ed. It's a creative JavaScript course, which is a great course but at some point , I realized that learning through video only won't make me go so far because it introduces you to something called tutorial hell. From there, I started to learn from documentation, and combine resources with another book called Eloquent JavaScript. If anything that I don't understand, I will just try to search for the answer in a book or StackoverFlow.

Do you have any advice that you want to give to a beginner coming on to this whole self learning journey?

The best advice that i can give is, learning programming is hard and don’t give up easily. If you are starting, don't just stick to one learning resource, don’t just learn by watching videos, go and read articles, maybe for example from Medium.com or go find the answer in the documentation. There’s always an answer out there, you just need to go and find it.  It's ok if your code looks bad now, it's all part of the learning process.

Has there been a really big impact on your life ever since you learned to code?

I find there's a lot of opportunity in the I.T. world and it opened a lot of job opportunities for me and also freelance opportunities. It also made me, in a way understand how things work

Can you elaborate more on your last point?

When I first started with Editor X, I always wondered why they can't just introduce this or that feature into it, but when I start to learn programming, I become more empathetic as I understand why they can't do this, it's hard to implement and not as easy as everyone trying to complain.

If there's one way that you can accelerate your whole learning progress what would that one thing be?

Maybe it’s how I see a bad code, what I mean by that is because I've been going through this thing called “perfectionist hell” where if someone else can write a better code than me, I will be stuck there for a long time pondering and it really slows down my learning progress.

But then later on I realised that everyone learned from the mistake and if you know what's your mistake, you'll know what’s the problem and what stuff you need to learn to avoid the same mistake next time and write a better code.

What would be your final closing note for all the beginners out there on their learning journey?

For all the beginners or learners out there, don't give up, just keep on going. It will be hard at first but don't give up. Everyone will feel the same way, it's not only just you. If you can endure it,  you will feel everything is achievable even the complicated things like reject haha.

Thanks for the awesome interview !

Hope you enjoyed this series!

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