Hey there! My name is Adam. I am a developer and designer, that for the past couple years, has been working at Madwire and Marketing360 full time.
https://madwire.com
https://marketing360.com
I started as a designer (I have a degree in graphic design specifically) but have a passion for design focused development. I live to code, and my primary focus at the moment is Vue, Node, Wordpress, PHP/MySQL and learning other languages whenever I can.
Currently I am a lead developer for the custom development team at Madwire, and that means that I build and maintain custom solutions for our clients. This type of work includes custom Wordpress plugins, applications, and themes.
I like to utilize Vue.js when needed to allow dynamic data binding, along with async ajax to interact with the PHP back end of wordpress sites.
The reason I started this AMA, is that I am trying to get more involved in the Dev community and I would love to help out my fellow developers.
Ask me anything!
Top comments (5)
Hi, Adam. I found this post while googling around and it empowered me to sign up just so that I can ask you for tips. You see, I also just got a degree in design. But I have always been drawn to web development. I started by getting a certificate as a front-end developer and now I am currently in a coding Bootcamp to become a web developer. But I feel like I don't want to lose all the skills I earned as a designer in art school. What career path do you recommend for me seeing that we both have almost the same background and passion for design/code.?
I spent about a 1.5 years doing design primarily as my job. I enjoy design, but I think my passion really lies in combining the design with a functional and interactive site, and that is where my exploration in coding started.
I actually first started seriously getting into development by building Photoshop extensions/plugins so that my photographer and designer friends could be more productive in their design workflows.
Finding real world problems that you can code out a solution to is a great way to start exploring what areas of development you want get into more as far as a career path goes.
For me when I transitioned from design to development at my employer, it was because I was building tools to improve our designer's day with code, coding out new UI bits for our site platform and trying to innovate in any way I could. I wanted to move past the role of designer, and I showed them that through the work I did.
At a certain point, I sat down and talked to my leadership team, and told them I wanted to move into dev full time, and they listened to my ideas and moved me into a position so that I could do development full time.
I would continue using your design skills to work on problems you find you could solve with code. Build out mockups in design programs first, think about typography choices and hierarchy when you create css for projects, and just continue to think about how your explorations within code can benefit from all your knowledge in design.
I doubt you will lose your knack for design, and stepping away from your code for a bit when you hit a snag or tough bug to think about the design aspects of your code can be a great way to approach your project with fresh eyes.
If you can find a job full time in a company you believe in, and believes in you, even if it is just design at first, then you can show them your skills, and show them where you want to go. Work hard, think about the problems unique to your situation, and work to solve them.
I wish you the best of luck!
Thank you very much! It means a lot.
Thank you for this opportunity!
What's your preferred way to learn some advanced things related to the stack that you are using?
For example, mine is to explore os projects and extract the techniques that I found interesting.
Thank you for your time!
Since I work in primarily things related to PHP and wordpress at the moment, I really try to look at all the best development products for the ecosystem and try and use them an inspiration. I think that is probably similar to what you are saying about os projects.
Getting into Vue and learning moderns front end has helped me iterate on ideas quickly and prototype ideas faster in that regard. I also try not to jump around too much when it comes to focussing on different areas of front end.
I spent some time with react, jquery, handlebars, and other front end tech, but at the end of the day I decided to focus on Vue. It can be hard not to go mess around with all the new shiny things when they first come out, but there is so much that can be learned in just one area of development, that I try and remember what my passion is, and not get swept up in the constant nw stuff that pops up daily in the JS world.