Designer to Developer

Hi Michael,

First of congrats on taking ownership for moving your career forward from visual designer to developer. I also have visual design experience as well and now focusing on ux/front-end development. Here are a few tips that have helped me along the way so far:

1. Realizing it's not a destination. I will never be finished learning about development - there will always be another repo, library, framework or plugin that does something cool i'll want to checkout. Enjoy the journey and make it habitual.

2. Some fed/ux books I have enjoyed are: Sass for Web Designers, Lean UX, Smashing UX Design, Sass & Compass for Designers, A Project Guide to UX Design, Mobile First, CSS3 for Web Designers to name a few...

3. Practice coding, copying and google. Practice coding what you know even if it's minimal. Practice copying and stiching together existing code from repos, plugins libs, gems etc. to make something that excites you. Practice googling the right questions and use sites like devdocs.io (reference), stackoverflow.com (answers) and github.com (resources).

4. Get comfortable with your setup. There are a million ways to work, so set yours and build from there instead of constantly switching. I mostly use use: vim/sublime for editing, gulp for building, watching, concat and git/github for source control/deploy. I also like google chrome devtools + workspaces + live reload if I just feel like working in the browser.

5. Baby steps. I took a ruby class awhile ago at GA but realized I need to solidify my frontend development before I improve my backend development skills (ruby, php etc). Granted, it depends on what you are trying to build but try to keep the gradient shallow at first and increase quicker as you go.

Not sure if that helps but thats all I can think of at the moment. In my experience your skills don't increase incrementally they jump or level up - those are great days!

Tony

It might also help to know what track you are on and what you are trying to accomplish in being a developer. Anyway good luck!

Honestly, I would ask yourself what do you see yourself doing more in the future? do you want to work back-end developer involving frameworks and structure of hierarchy of how things function or do you want to be more upfront controlling the aesthetics of a layout? I can go into a deeper discussion but that's probably the simplest way to break out the difference between those two. Also, while similar to each other... programming and web development are two entire different languages.

That would be number one, focus on where you want to gain the advantage, you can surely do both if that's what you feel like, I mean hell, I am dabble in front develop, graphic design and digital illustrations all together. There is no boundary to where you can leap, as long you make the time for what you want to accomplish and have the drive to grind through.

I have worked with CMS and the market with the drag and drop editors which apparently are suppose to "collapse" web development coding once and for good, but I don't think that's anytime soon and I'll rather learn something traditionally than be confined to restrictions which is exactly what some frameworks provide, a lack of flexibility and unnecessary excess code that processes slow loading for the user experience.

Cool I bet you are learning a lot from 6mo intensive. I Didn't get far enough into Ruby to wish I has a CS bkgrd. I don't have a dev bkgrd but I hope using both sides of my brain will reap great rewards and allow me to innovate in unexpected ways some day soon.

Don't be scared of CLI - jump right into using git, ssh, vim.