Let me get the boring stuff out of the way first: My name is Kabelo Maswanganye and I live in Pretoria. I am a self-taught developer who started coding during the Covid-19 lockdown of 2020.

The reason I started coding was literally boredom. I was bored out of my skull and needed something to keep me busy. After I had burned through all the seasons of Game Of Thrones and watched the entire Harry Potter series twice, I needed something that was productive. That is when Facebook somehow read my mind and started advertising coding bootcamps to me.

This lead me down a deep Google and YouTube rabbit hole that ended with me printing my first “Hello World” in python. That feeling was amazing. Very exciting. For the next few months, all my free time was spent working on python. Time really does fly while coding.

Web Development only crossed my radar towards the end of 2020. I was on twitter looking for topics to follow and realised that most of Tech Twitter was mostly web development content, so I gave it shot. I found a FreeCodeCamp HTML and CSS YouTube video and followed it. Now if printing Hello World in python was exciting, building my first website was exhilarating. It was as ugly as hell, but I didn’t care. I loved it. I loved it so much I probably sent all my WhatsApp contacts a screenshot. Bragging about my new skill.

For the next few months I continued to work on HTML, CSS and JavaScript, but only as a hobby. I enjoyed all the cool things I could do with them. It was all fun and games and I loved it.

I became deliberate in my learning around May 2021. This is when I realised that I could turn web development into a real career. A solid career. So I developed a routine, structured my learning schedule and topics, and actively started working towards being employable. This included adding WordPress and React to my tech stack.

And so here we are, 6 months later and I have learnt so much that I needed a place to store all this new information. A place for me to permanently store where I am in my learning journey, so I can go back and properly reference my growth.

I hope all who read this also contribute to my learning.