Day 21 Of Daily Notes Series
While surfing daily news updates I read the following tweet from Drew McLellan, Co-founder of Perch CMS and Notist (a public speaking portfolio) asking his followers to tell him about good things happened from their side project(s).
In the @drewm thread his followers responded replying him their side projects landing them a full time job or a full time career. Inspired by their response, I thought to write my own experience about my casual pass time side project turning into my current full time activities.
A Casual Side Project
Around 2010-11, I was trying to build a simple static website as my casual pass time side project. At that time I had some exposure to HTML & table-based layout that I had learned during the late 90s using Adobe Dreamweaver. I didn’t know much about CSS and CSS-based layout. I spend lot of my spare time learning basic HTML & CSS from the w3schools. While I was able to create basic website, I stumbled while trying to add an interactive contact form on my site. After some research I realized that it required some knowledge of server-side language like PHP or JavaScript.
Introduction to WordPress
Around 2012, one of friends introduced me to a web developer who suggested me to help create me an interactive website with WordPress. The WordPress powered site met all my requirements and I was quite impressed with it. More over, I fell in love with its content management aspect because I didn’t had to ask anybody to update my contents. However its maintenance & customization required me to learned WordPress deeply.
Learning by Doing Projects
I spend almost five years (2012-2017) learning deeply WordPress primarily through theme development projects, documenting learning & writing tips for personal reference. Since 2018, I have been learning JavaScript, Reactjs and Gatsbyjs.
Currently, I am working full time on my side project with a goal to starting a remote career on consulting, creating tutorial blog posts and writing technical tutorial posts for publication in other websites.
Content of this Notes was inspired by Drew McLellan‘s twitter thread. Cover photo by Octavian Dan on Unsplash