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"Nobody wants to be Magellan"

I'm not sure who coined that phrase. I first heard it from my friend, Blair, and it has popped into my head any time I feel shy or self-conscious about starting something new. Creating anything from scratch is really difficult, and I'm caught up in imposter syndrome right now as I start this blog. Well, here we go.

I've been writing web code for a long, long time. I remember logging into Geocities back in middle school, and on a dial-up modem struggling to figure out how HTML, CSS, and JavaScript could all fit together to show a sub-navigation menu on hover. In high school I attended a class in the evenings that taught me how to build websites using Dreamweaver. Floating images and wrapping text were just as funky and error-prone then as they are today. I remember spending hours trying to achieve a minimalist style on my Myspace profile, and getting so frustrated with the janky hacks and tools that system posed. There was no Stack Overflow back then, just poorly written guides scattered throughout the internet, and good old fashioned trial and error.

I started the most recent chapter of my coding journey in February 2016, when I was accepted into the Coding Bootcamp at the University of Texas, a program run by Trilogy Education. I won't get into that experience right now as it's something that could be a full blog post on its own. Broadly speaking, though, it was an intense first experience with full stack web development, starting with basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, and moving into Node, Express, React, MySQL, Mongo, and some side quests into Laravel and PHP, all in the short span of six months.

My first job out of the bootcamp has been as a Web Developer at Austin PBS, KLRU-TV, a public media organization in Austin. I started there in December 2016. Just this past Thursday, May 24, 2018, I launched a new station website. This was a huge undertaking, a massive project that I started on the day I was on-boarded at the station. A date calculator tells me that that is 1 year, 5 months, and 17 days.

The station has been on WordPress for the better part of a decade. While that was a good choice to make years back, the site itself has become stale and dated, and the code it was built on was poorly maintained and posed security vulnerabilities. It reached a point where simple maintenance took more focus than our ability to implement new features.

So we have migrated off of a complicated set of WordPress installs to a Node/Express server on Digital Ocean that uses Contentful as a headless CMS, and leverages Node's native Async/Await functionality to pull content and TV schedule information from various APIs. The new site also eschews any popular frontend frameworks, like jQuery or Bootstrap in favor of ES6 and the new CSS Grid.

It's been a wonderful learning experience, and I'm now in a spot where I want to record the things I've learned, places I've had difficulties or failures, and solutions I've found. And while it's true that nobody wants to be Magellan, if my writings and experiences can help anyone else on their own coding journey, then it will have been worth it, and I'll feel successful in carrying the torch of those days spent wrestling with Geocities, Dreamweaver, and Myspace, bashing out code, trying to make things just right. Fair warning: I am new to blogging, so prepare for things to be a bit rough around the edges as I figure it out.