How I became a Developer in about 15-ish or so years

#roadmap #developer

(This post was originally written in March 2022 on my defunct blog. Moved it here.)

Follow this roadmap and you too can be a dev in 15 years.

Pre-2006: My road to coding

College. I took coding courses.
I learned Java. I discovered I suck with Java too.
My new life calling - this fart app made $10,000 a day.
I dropped out. My mate and I hacked together mobile apps, trying to score that fart app money.
I am broken. I suck at coding. I suck at college. I owe a lot of money. 💀

Started attending conferences. It was incredibly hostile and exclusive. 🔪 Very 'old guard'.
WordPress development was hot. And community was super nice.
Started WordPress themes/plugins. Now I sucked at both Java AND PHP.
Still in severe debt. Worked with websites (I did SEO and marketing), but never as a bona fide developer.
Wrote scripts to automate things like bots and social media.
Minecraft (Java) was getting popular. Should I dig deeper in Java? Haha no. Java is too traumatic.
Recieved a Raspberry Pi.

I hacked Wordpress templates together. Genesis Framework
Someone paid me $200 to build them a WordPress site. Am I a developer? No. I built iPhone apps, games and websites. But I'm no developer.
I fell in love with jQuery, Bootstrap, FontAwesome, and web languages. (ugh to SQL)
People started talking about React, but it didn't make sense.
Still building bots. Still creating scripts.
I automated a huge chunk of my day job. You can Javascript in Google docs, you know?

Job learn I could build websites. They chose to ignore me automating my job. 🤷
Job told me to build websites. Yer a developer, Harry!
Job offloaded me to other people to build websites. I was now doing development for over 50+ hours.
I spoke at conferences about marketing, seo. Now I was speaking about web development.
Started fully understanding Javascript. And jQuery is starting to show it's age.
Data science was getting big. Should I play with Python?
React is getting much bigger. I still don't get it?!?!
I helped on a Angular project. Why are JS frameworks so confusing?
I started working on Laravel projects. I like Laravel.
I returned to conferences/meetups. Much more inclusive now 🏳️‍🌈👨🏿👸! The old guard is dead? ☠️

All my friends were into React, Gatsby, GraphQL. Why is this so hard?!?!
Finally started learning React (through a Bootcamp), while also digging into Vue.
🙌 🙌 🙌 OMG JS FRAMEWORKS MAKES SENSE NOW. 🙌 🙌 🙌
Still relying on smashing libraries together, like a crutch.
Work was all WordPress, so I took freelancing jobs to do more JS framework things.
I lead WordPress meetups, did conf talks, and ran web development workshops. Heck yeah I'm going to make my spaces real ✨safe and inclusive✨. EVERYONE is invited 🏳️‍🌈👨🏿👸! Go suck a 🍋, old guard! (Yes I'm very spiteful.)

Really find myself understanding the web fundamentals. Vanilla HTML, CSS, JS... real mastery instead of hacking things.
I learned that the <details> element is magical.
Spent the pandemic focusing on mental health.
Started feeling framework fatigue. I could switch between React and Vue. Played around with Svelte.
Started writing vanilla everything more, or trying to code things directly instead of finding a crutch like a library.
After 4 years, I finally understood testing libraries.
Still not going to touch Java.
Finally found a real use-case for my Raspberry pi. Pi-hole.