I spent 10yrs in a career of branding/advertising and went from knowing no programming to launching my first product in a year.
Super proud to share I just hit a personal milestone of 150 paying customers.
It's been quite an emotional ride but wanted to say if you're just starting out, keep going, it's totally worth it, whether you want to build your own business or switch to a career as a software engineer.
The biggest tip I can provide is to figure out your learning style. I tried first with books, but I'm terrible with reading and originally gave up telling myself I didn't have time. Then I moved on to watching videos and something magical just clicked.
I learned by doing a short course on Udemy and then just watching a ton of YouTube.
For context, here's what I built: https://llamalife.co
(It's a productivity application which helps provide structure and focus to get work done).
Feel free to ask anything about the journey.
Not going to lie, it was a hard slog, but extremely happy I did it. And the feeling you get from knowing you built something, by yourself, is amazing :)
Latest comments (58)
Cool well done!
It inspires me to do something... Thanks for the post
The site you provide is blank, I clicked on it and it displays null. kindly work on that, I'd like to see what you have done thus far, and very glad you transit to tech industry. Happy coding.
I know this great feeling, when your code works=)
I've been a full-stack developer for more than 10 years and getting a product live with paying customers is still something I've yet to achieve.
That you've taught yourself to code, shipped something and got paying customers all within a year is super impressive and inspiring.
Nice work :0)
Thanks for the encouragement!
thanks Wessel! haha the button - that almost didn't make the cut. Took it out and put it back in several times before deciding to leave it
Very proud of you!
thank you 😃
Congrats Keep success and learn and spread knowledge
Hi Marie! Thanks for your post - very interesting knowing how you learned to code. Llama Life is great! Haven't tried it yet, but it looks super stylish and well designed. Did you just use CSS for the layout or did you use a framework like Bootstrap or Tailwind? Looks like you really grasped Javascript and React. Where did you get the Llama illustrations - did you do them yourself?
Thanks Mark! I used React Bootstrap for the grid layout of the landing page and a few modals, but the rest is custom. The llama illustrations I got from Adobe Stock but then edited them. Adobe Stock gives you a 30 day free trial (I think) and 10 images included with that. Even if you cancel you retain the licences for whatever you download.
Ok cool. Will checkout Adobe Stock. I'll probably write post like yours about how i learned to code (mainly self-taught too). Here's the first project I did - onyourfrequency.com/
It's all vanilla Javascript - learning Vue JS now to keep the project more organized in the future.
Just took a quick look. Great stuff and congrats for pushing the project out!
Love the post and your general energy as a human being. Signing up for a lifetime mainly as kudos because lord knows I'll probably procrastinate actually using the app :)
Thanks Nikki! That means a lot and I appreciate the support :)