DEV Community: Maya

How I decided to become a web developer at age 35

Maya — Fri, 08 Jul 2022 15:25:00 +0000

This is a thumbs up for all those who believe it is never too late to change direction later in life.
My career path has been anything but linear. I have always been a curious person, eager to learn new things so it has always been difficult for me to commit to a course or study or a career for a lifetime. I studied political science and worked for nearly 10 years in the non-profit and public sector. After a while, I became restless and decided that I needed a change. I have always been a big art lover so I first started to venture into the world of design. Because I was in full-time employment at the time, I opted for a part-time study and enrolled for a distance learning degree in visual communications at the Open College of the Arts (UK). Meanwhile, I discovered SuperHi, an online school targeted at designers and other creative professionals who want to learn coding. Because the tutors are very engaging and available and the projects are fun and visually very appealing, SuperHi is what really got me hooked on coding! After passing foundational HTML, CSS and JavaScript I took a deep dive with other frameworks and technologies: React, Wordpress, Shopify, Ruby on Rails...
In 2019 I moved to Italy taking a career break. I had time to focus on my studies and improve my programming skills. I took part in a three-month intensive bootcamp organized by Aulab, a software house in Bari, which in addition to the front-end fundamentals also gave me an introduction to back-end coding with Laravel. At the end of the course and after a few short gigs, I was lucky to be hired for my first developer job at Avanade where I am now working on large-scale enterprise applications using Angular.
It has been and still is a bumpy ride. For people like me with training in humanities and an atypical background programming has a particularly steep learning curve. I still continue to learn every day and try to add new skills to my tool box. This year I am also taking courses in UX/UI Design since I would like to move more into UI and/or mobile development.
Starting anew at age 35 is definitely not easy and it can be humbling to have colleagues who are much younger than you and with much more experience to coach you. You have to leave your ego behind and adopt a growth mindset - although it will be tough, don't think "I can't do this", but rather "I can't do this... yet."

Question about Wordpress and Gatsby

Maya — Sun, 26 Jun 2022 14:01:42 +0000

Hi folks, I am just following some tutorials on building a Gatsby site with a Wordpress backend using GraphQL. I was wondering if anybody has done this kind of work for a client. Do you need two domain names and double hosting in this case, one for the WP site and one for the Gatsby site? Can you use the free hosted wordpress.com in this case? Either way, don't you just end up with a duplicate site and how do you redirect traffic to and index only your Gatsby site? Just a lot of confusion...

How to include span tags in an array?

Maya — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 10:00:51 +0000

I am doing a page using React and I need to make some parts of the text bold. Normally I would do this using span tags but the problem is that the text is coming from an array. I tried including the span tag in the array by concatenation but I am getting a weird result. Anyone knows a workaround?
The result:

The code:

CSS grid compatibility for iOS

Maya — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 09:50:33 +0000

I have a strange issue that a design I did using CSS grid is not displaying properly on iOS devices, irrespective of the browser (Safari, Chrome, etc). On the other hand, the grid is displayed normally on Android devices. Is there a particular incompatibility between the operational system and this CSS rule? If you are an iPhone owner and you want to test, the page I am talking about is this: https://may4eto.github.io/gallery/ (the images appear stretched out vertically). I tried changing the viewport settings in the HTML and used autoprefixer for the CSS but still doesn't work.

CSS help

Maya — Sat, 23 Jan 2021 10:19:37 +0000

I have a bit of a tricky CSS problem and I am not sure what is the best way to go. I need to reproduce the page in the attachment both in a desktop and mobile version. I decided to use CSS grid but I am not sure what is the best way to achieve the offset column design. I thought about giving classes to certain images and offsetting them with translate(Y) but in the mobile version the images that need to be offset change.
https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/i/16kb3gefay8yjuilt7uv.png