I taught myself to code, started in 2010 after 10 years in IT infra/networking. I’m not a professional developer and it’s a hobby for me - I did a humanities degree with no comp/sci background.
Initially I built a simple crud app to track water changes for my aquarium. For a while there I had it online as a free SaaS app too. It was using Ruby on Rails, and I had no idea how to use JavaScript to make the UX better.
Fast forward a few years and I was getting fed up with voicemail, so I read up on APIs and figured out how to use GCPs transcription service, pointing to audio files in twilio (I diverted my mobile to twilio to act as my voicemail). Actually pretty simple even though it might sound complicated.
Fast forward to last year and I built a free directory to raise the profile of primary producers who were missing out on foot traffic as a result of COVID, closely followed by another project I’m close to launching. These last two projects were in nodejs as I figured I had better finally figure out JavaScript.
When I was completely stuck on something I did a lot of googleing and watching YouTube - that happened a lot, particularly when trying to get my head around promises.
Moral of the story, don’t be put off with CRUD apps, they are very rewarding. Just build stuff you enjoy when you have spare time (for me evenings after child in bed).
Initially I built a simple crud app to track water changes for my aquarium. For a while there I had it online as a free SaaS app too. It was using Ruby on Rails, and I had no idea how to use JavaScript to make the UX better.
Fast forward a few years and I was getting fed up with voicemail, so I read up on APIs and figured out how to use GCPs transcription service, pointing to audio files in twilio (I diverted my mobile to twilio to act as my voicemail). Actually pretty simple even though it might sound complicated.
Fast forward to last year and I built a free directory to raise the profile of primary producers who were missing out on foot traffic as a result of COVID, closely followed by another project I’m close to launching. These last two projects were in nodejs as I figured I had better finally figure out JavaScript.
When I was completely stuck on something I did a lot of googleing and watching YouTube - that happened a lot, particularly when trying to get my head around promises.
Moral of the story, don’t be put off with CRUD apps, they are very rewarding. Just build stuff you enjoy when you have spare time (for me evenings after child in bed).