Since my apprenticeship ended, I’ve been thinking about what I really want to do. The answer, as always, is “Visual design,” and now I’m trying to make my way there as directly as possible.
When I joined my bootcamp two years ago, I got a phone call while I was trying to get help after I had lost my housing. They told me I had been selected for the iOS cohort, which wasn’t my first choice, but I was so happy to get in, I stuck with it.
When I joined Microsoft LEAP, I was told my first week I would be working on Azure, which wasn’t my first choice, but I was so happy to get in, I stuck with it.
Notice a pattern?
I count both my bootcamp and my apprenticeship as valuable experiences, but I feel most happy and at home when I’m working on timing for animations, plotting layouts, and coding custom elements or views. I’m not particularly enthused about storage, database queries, networking, or how much the latest version of Swift differs from the version of Swift from 3 months ago. That stuff is important, but it’s not what I want to base my career off of.
I had an interview for an iOS position recently, but I’ve been feeling sick for the past week, and any time I felt up for coding, I drifted into doing web development instead of brushing up on mobile. Going back to iOS just felt like a chore. I wound up oversleeping the day of the interview because I had been up all night working on a website with a CSS grid layout. Eventually, I emailed them about what happened, and admitted that I just didn’t feel very excited about doing mobile development.
If there were a position where all I did was visual design using Swift, I would be all over it. Unfortunately, that job doesn’t exist yet, so if I were to continue pursuing mobile jobs, I’d have to compromise. On the other hand, front-end dev is a job that exists, and leans much more heavily into the parts of coding that truly interest me.
I’ve spent the past month studying Javascript, CSS, and React, and trying to build up my web portfolio. This site, which uses a chunk of custom CSS, is certainly part of my new strategy, though I’m still not confident enough to pull away from using someone else’s theme. You can see some of my latest work here and here.