I don't think I ever thought that I would ever come to this point, but I'm here. I'm starting my first ever development blog. First, let's start with a little background about myself. I'm a front-end engineer, and I've been building user facing experiences for almost 10 years. I still remember when I began to teach myself how to code back in 2013 like it was yesterday.
I didn't start out as a developer though. I actually began my journey as a graphic designer. I loved art and design: typography, layout, color, and composition. I had gotten interested in graphic design when I and a group of some friends at church decided to start a video production ministry called "Project Creation". We wanted to script and record short films that contained a message of hope and salvation for people in this dark world of sin.
One of my friends was a music producer, and I just loved the idea of the ministry. As I began to brainstorm ideas for a logo, one of my other friends in the group told me he knew of a guy who was a graphic designer and asked him if he could assist us with creating a logo. He ultimately furnished us an initial concept, and as I began to tweak it and play around with it, I became deeply interested in design.
Unfortunately, the ministry eventually died as life happened for all of us, but my passion for design grew stronger. I had purchased my first 13" MacBook and downloaded Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator and taught myself how to design. I got better at it, and before I knew it, I was designing logos and flyers for my barber and every barbershop that he worked with. I then started to grow a little clientele, and I started designing posters for church events.
So one day I decided I wanted a degree in visual communication design, so I started taking classes at Valencia Community College. It wasn't until one day in class where I heard my professor say that he had made $10k for a client website he had built, and that shocked me. I remember thinking to myself, "man, that's a lot of money for a single website, maybe I should start building websites". As I continued on in the courses, I became increasingly interested in web design, which led me to begin offering the service to my existing clients. I really liked it to the point where I decided to try my hand at building basic static XHTML websites for my clients and expand my offerings.
Around this time (2008), the world's first Android phone, the T-Mobile G1 (HTC Dream) came out and I became an early adopter. I was a big Android fanboy, and I got in to rooting and hacking my phone with custom ROMs and firmwares so that I could have custom features and custom themes on my phone that other people didn't have. One time I even flashed a custom ROM to my phone that had unlocked the front-facing camera disabled in phones sold in America, but enabled in European versions of the same phone, and then walked into a T-Mobile store to show off and the employees were shocked and jealous that the phones that they were selling did not have the front camera enabled while mine did.
I was deeply interested in code by my experience with hacking my android phones, being exposed to Linux, bash commands and Java .apk files. I was so impressed with how these guys with deep expertise with Linux could reverse engineer the Linux kernel to customize the OS, and make them even better than the companies who were releasing the software built into the phones. They would build new features into the software that were better than the software that was sold with the phones, so much so that Google and Samsung began to either incorporate these custom features as part of future versions of the Android open source project, or would even hire these engineers directly to go and work for them.
I wished that I could contribute to projects like these, and build software that impacted so many people, while having fun at the same time. While I didn't have a CS degree or know how to write Android apps, I saw web development as the next best thing, and as a way for me to build apps as the easiest barrier of entry. A few years later, In 2013, after advice from a close friend of mine who was already a senior web developer (and Apple fanboy), I decided to teach myself how to write HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Fast forward 9 years, I am now (at the time of this writing) a dev lead at Endava, and I have built many web apps, maintain a digital publishing platform for Seventh-day Adventists pioneer articles called Pioneer Writings and I'm currently in the process of building the world's first platform for immersive interactive Bible study courses, codenamed Verbx.
After reading countless other blog posts from other developers on a wide variety of subjects, mainly about tutorials and cool new JavaScript libraries and frameworks, I've decided to start writing posts of things that I'm interested in around the ever evolving JavaScript ecosystem, solutions to problems that I solved either in personal projects or in work related projects, or about some new skills or technology that I've learned or am learning.
Anyways, I said all of that to say this: I'm starting a dev blog. My intention and goal is not for it to be a thriving, high traffic blog with lots of followers. So It may not be as great and fully featured as the typical dev blogs that you see out there, but it will be good enough for me to express myself as an engineer and for others who care enough to read my posts.