Web Development: Programming and Design in 2022.

5 min readJan 26, 2022

The Beginning

Learning anything new can be hard, especially when it comes to exploring your creative and technical abilities. Some people get to explore and grow either one of their skills at an early stage growing up, few find and improve both skills at an early age in life. While it can be fun developing these skill set at a young age most individuals ignore their abilities and focus on improving the skill set they lack or want because of influence, society, and family. I hate to admit it, I am guilty of such.

Change is critical

In 2021, the world was worried about the COVID virus, vaccines, political affairs, climate change, and other global issues. I was at home thinking critically about my current situation as a graduate and where to go from my position. What surprised me was how little I cared about what the world was doing, news, social media, and what my friends were up to. Finding myself in my current state, I realized I needed a change not just in my career but more importantly in my skills. As someone who majored in Architecture, I can tell you that life was not a breeze at the university.

Something New

After much thinking and self-reflection, I decided to enter a Bootcamp to learn web development and focus on how I can contribute to the tech ecosystem. It was a hassle in choosing what Bootcamp to go to and why. To start with, I didn't want anyone to know my business, and lastly, there are a lot of boot camps out there. To be honest, choosing one was difficult. I decided to enter the Univelcity Bootcamp because it was nearer, and they had no bad reviews plus as a bonus taking the full-stack program, I get to learn product design and agile product management. The deal seemed fair, which was how I decided to take the full-stack program. The program was for six months, with frontend development and product design for the first three months while backend and agile product management for the last three months.

Front end in three months

Frontend development was the first course I took at Univelcity. I remember everyone's face in the room, so intense, curious, and uncertain. Thanks to the facilitator's very dull jokes, the tension in the room eased up to a lighter mode from time to time. The frontend program started with how the web works to basic HTML, which was a little familiar because of the little practice I had with HTML on free code camp before attending the Bootcamp. Thank you, free code camp. Six weeks into the program, I created a lot of projects using HTML and CSS. By the end of the program, I learned how to use JavaScript and ReactJS to create applications. This was all fun until I had to put in the work, practising and reading about data structures.

Product Design in three months

Product design was a more creative program, I noticed that most people enjoy designing and exploring their creative side. On the first day of class, I was merely introduced to UI, my facilitator mostly spoke on user experience and how UX determines the UI. I thought to myself, “it makes sense why top companies spend a lot on research”. I spent the first six weeks of product design, learning about design processes and user experience I realized that extensive and detailed user research is needed to create a good user interface to give consumers a seamless user experience. This was unexpected as I thought it was going to be about designing applications with Figma, sketch or Adobe XD on the first day. During the last six months, I began learning how to design the UI for both mobile and web applications, which was where creativity started kicking in. Product Design gave me a similar feeling to architecture because they both involve a series of steps to produce the final product. Not gonna lie, product design is all fun especially when you’re designing a user interface, but the real work comes when you’re carrying out UX research. Trust Me.

Practice, Practice, and Practice

After completing both the product design and front-end program, the Christmas holiday was around the corner. I felt this was not going to be a holiday I take a holiday because I had lots of work, projects to finish, and skills to develop. During the holiday, I created a list that was pasted in front of my workstation to document my progress during the holiday. As the holiday passed, I created lots of projects to display on my website. Projects such as a video chat application with NodeJS and Agora API, a Christmas animation with HTML and CSS, a task management mobile app, a real estate web app, UX research on loneliness among older people, and a lot more. In the end, I couldn't do everything that was written on the list, but I sure did a lot of projects that I wanted.

The story continues

Today, I look back sometimes and think of how far I have improved in such a short time. My facilitators and everyone at Univelcity helped me in this process of building a solid foundation in web development. My journey continues as I currently take backend development (Python in 2022 and Python for Beginners) and agile project management to complete the full-stack program. Unlike the first three months, I can say I am less confused and ready to become a full-stack developer.