My love affair with digital design began with my web-based food-prep startup. Though it was an exhausting two year venture that eventually failed, it was an experience that revealed my true passion; digital design and creative problem solving.
Growing up I spent countless hours doodling, sketching, drawing, drafting and painting. So, it came as no surprise that even while I was experiencing burnout, the creative side of the business venture never failed to energize me.
As an artist that hadn't picked up a brush in years, I was having so much fun creating again. The joy of branding, website building, photography, photo editing and graphic design all had the same feel as creating traditional art - and I was hooked.
For me, digital design is largely an extension of traditional art. Switching to a digital medium was accomplished by gleaning every ounce of knowlege I could from the web. I learned from blogs, youtube tutorials and forums. And then I practiced practiced practiced! After my startup ended, I found myself helping friends with creative digital endeavors; redesigning logos, editing photos, even reworking websites just for fun.
Much of my web design foundation was built from using a template website platform. My startup was built on Squarespace, and I adapted features as needed to make it work for my beta website. I picked up some UI/UX best practices and even stuck my toe in the coding water a bit, by adding CSS to further customize the site.
Three years ago I was able to dive into design full time after a move to Italy. I continued to build sites in Squarespace, but after years of working with template-based designs, I began to feel its limitations. I yearned for more creative freedom and had a curiosity about the inner-workings of a website.I wanted to really understand websites.
With time on my side, I figured the best way to learn was building a website from scratch. I read books, studied free courses online, and managed to build a hobby site. I had created a pretty good responsive site, but when it came to trying to get it to do some complex functions, I was overwhelmed. I was facing decision paralysis. There were so many choices when it came to learning the backend of a website. I didn't know what was best, or where to begin. That led me LeWagon's coding bootcamp in Amsterdam. It was an intense 3 months of learning JavaScript, CSS3, Sass and HTML5, as well as the backend language of Ruby and its framework Rails.
I had done my research and picked one of the best bootcamps in Europe, and it paid off. Not only did I learn how websites worked on a deeper level, but I learned how to program. Learning to program made me feel like I had a super power. Now when I face a challenging feature request, it's not a matter of if it's possible, but rather figuring out how. I enjoy the problem solving and watching a web application come to life.
Since bootcamp, I have been building a web application that automates a the workflow of a real estate investment company. It has been a great challenge and so much fun.
Every day I wake up excited to get to work. For me, web development is a perfect mix of problem solving, creativity and art.