In late 2016 I enrolled at a coding bootcamp called Bitwise in Fresno, and over the following year I worked my way from vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript all the way up to Angular 1. I loved the process of building something from nothing and watching it come to life in a browser. It was the first time in my career that I felt that particular kind of creative satisfaction, where you start with a blank file and end up with something that actually does what you intended.
When the bootcamp wrapped up, I had a decision to make. If I wanted to keep going with web development, I needed to either join a cohort or find an internship. At the same time, I was building a career in alcohol-beverage operations, and things were going well on that side. It was one of those fork-in-the-road moments where you can really only commit to one direction. I wrote about the decision at the time, and I chose to stick with operations.
It was probably the right call at the time, but the question kept coming back over the next several years. I'd find myself deep in an Excel model or troubleshooting a Power BI dashboard and catch myself wondering how much further I could take this kind of work if I actually knew how to code. It wasn't regret so much as a persistent feeling that I'd closed a door I wasn't quite done walking through.
By late 2022, I was ready to come back. I had a few specific products I wanted to build, ideas that had been bouncing around in my head for a while, and I wanted to sit down and start making them real. What I wasn't prepared for was how much had changed while I was away. The web development world I remembered had gotten significantly more complicated, with frameworks I'd never heard of, layers of abstraction stacked on top of other abstractions, and what felt like a dizzying number of architectural decisions to make before I could even write a single line of code. Bundlers, runtimes, rendering strategies, state management libraries. Web dev used to be simpler than this, or maybe I just didn't know enough back then to see the complexity that was already there.
After spending some time trying to orient myself, I decided to start with React and work my way up through small projects: calculators, counters, a todo app. The kind of things that teach you how state and rendering work in a modern framework without demanding that you understand the entire ecosystem on day one.
I also wanted to use this second attempt to fill in the gaps I'd left behind the first time. When I was at Bitwise I never got as far as backend development, and I never formally studied algorithms or data structures. My operations career had taught me a lot about how to think about and organize data in a practical sense, the kind of instincts you develop from years of building reports and managing inventory systems, but I knew those instincts weren't technically rigorous. They solved business problems well enough, but there was a deeper level of understanding underneath them that I wanted to eventually reach.
I have no real idea where all of this goes, and I'm comfortable with that for now. I've wanted to come back to web development for a long time, and the tools available today, especially AI-assisted development, make the on-ramp shorter and less intimidating than it's ever been. I'm looking forward to finding out what I can build this time around.
— Lo