Heading into college, I had little to no coding experience. As such, when I got to UW as a non-native, everybody congratulated and respected me for getting into the CS program from out of state. I felt like an imposter amongst geniuses that were overqualified for this program. All around my peers seemed to surpass me and achieve great things like internships their freshman year. With what little I had to my name in terms of coding, I decided to create a website and learn basics such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to create something tangible that I liked looking at. I had no idea what I was getting into. Circa Jan. 2025 during break, my first draft of my website was born.
Granted, it wasn't the best website to ever exist, but it was something I made by myself over fall break (quarter system is weird) with the help of w3schools and htmldog. Coming back from fall break I decided to focus on building a website that I could be proud of and learn from. Enter my short-lived Figma and graphic design phase.
This was certainly an improvement from my first draft in terms of quality, and I decided to implement it for my first ever taste of the web development and coding world. After about half a year I’m now here writing my first blog post about that journey. To say it was tedious was an understatement. My code as it stands is not something I’m the proudest of because I feel as though I can code it better with the skills I learned by creating it. However, I think it’s important to recognize that perfection doesn’t exist and that chasing goals endlessly leads to sadness, so I’ve decided to launch this website! I’ve learned so many things through building this website and other projects and clubs this year. Some highlights are learning how to make a website more accessible, better ways to style and animate elements using CSS, and how important it is to add documentation for the sake of maintaining code. I’m proud of my growth this past year, and I plan to code a lot more because I found it a very fulfilling experience! Making everything from scratch from my own custom logo to a very limited stack (Again, just pure HTML, CSS, and JS, no libraries or frame works DO NOT DO THIS!!!) gives me ownership over both the good and bad of this website! In the future I plan on focusing on more technical interests in cybersecurity, specifically web, app, and cloud security. Thank you for reading this and hopefully this website doesn’t brick itself! (I’ll try posting more about security or other cool things in the future!)
With love, Chris. (っ˘ڡ˘ς)
