Something about myself

Allow me to introduce myself a little:

Where do I come from?

Taiwan, of course! But that's not what I want to talk about here. I received both my BA and MA in history, so it's safe to say that I come from a humanities background. Through my academic training as a historian, I've developed research and content-writing skills that can translate to a valuable skill in any industry: storytelling. As historians, we're skilled at curating and deconstructing stories, which comes in handy when you want to promote something or, let's be real, sabotage what your rivals are trying to promote. Seriously, why aren't more people hiring historians?

Professional experience

For two years, I worked as an assistant at the Church in Taipei (that's the official registered name). What did I do there? I pretty much did everything, including:

• Organizing quarterly Christian conferences and training programs for 100-300 attendees.
• Assisting in overseeing and managing international conferences with over 10,000 guests, providing quality services to clients worldwide.
• Developing and updating spreadsheets and databases to track, analyze, and report on church statistics.
• Providing writing support for church weekly reports and summaries of Christian publications.

These are just a few highlights I can easily bullet point for my LinkedIn and CV. Other tasks included giving messages to hundreds of people on stage, creating spreadsheets for church statistics, and even cleaning meeting halls after major events. Basically, I did it all. The most valuable takeaway from this experience is that I learned always to be ready to tackle new challenges. Sometimes I would fail, but I also grew through those experiences.

Why a developer?

My interest in web development began when I attended a digital humanities workshop during my studies. The instructor talked about how the web is going to impact the way knowledge is transmitted and then taught us some basics of HTML and CSS, showing us how they can make websites look nice. He even mentioned that, with the help of JavaScript, even those of us in the humanities could become developers (although he didn't have time to cover that in the workshop).

The main takeaway from this workshop was the realization that, to reach more people, high-quality content (which is what those in the humanities aim to create) needs to be supported by modern technologies. Since I believe the web is the most powerful and universal medium, and the instructor did teach us some basics of frontend development, I decided to give web development a try and ended up loving it.

My learning pre-bootcamp: Frontend!

Since I'm particularly drawn to websites' visual and interactive aspects, I knew that a career in frontend development was the right path for me. I took matters into my own hands and began self-learning the basics of HTML, CSS (my knowledge from the workshop was a good start, but there was still so much more to learn), and JavaScript. From there, I delved into libraries like Bootstrap and Tailwind CSS, and even CSS pre-processors like Sass. But it wasn't until I discovered the power of a frontend JavaScript library/framework like React that I truly felt like I had found my niche. While I still have much to learn and improve upon, I am confident in my abilities as a developer and excited to continue growing and developing my skills in this field.

Post-bootcamp: Going full-stack?

After a year of self-learning, I attended the Le Wagon Berlin Web Development bootcamp, where I learned about Ruby and Ruby on Rails. It enables us to build full-stack applications efficiently and effectively, and I found the experience really enjoyable. In addition to acquiring new technical skills, I also learned how to work in a team of developers using tools like Slack, Trello, and GitHub.

During the bootcamp's final projects week, my product pitch was selected, and I was chosen as the team lead for the final project team. Together, we built a full-stack travel companion app using Ruby on Rails. While it's far from perfect, it's something we are all proud of.

While I still lean towards frontend development, Le Wagon and Ruby on Rails definitely sparked my interest in exploring the backend more. Currently, I'm still focused on solidifying my skills in the frontend path (learning and building with React and NextJS at the moment), but I'm not limiting myself to any one specific "end" or tech stack. I am confident in my abilities as a developer and am excited to continue learning and growing in this field.