Hello everyone! As far as my web dev career goes, I have been fairly quiet for the past year or so.
I am still here and since May, I have been working remotely in a full-time position for a company based in British Columbia in the educational sector. I am their ‘Website IT Technician’. While my main responsibilities are managing their WordPress website; content changes, troubleshooting, design changes, configuring our CRM; Groundhogg, etc… I am also the point of contact on the team for assistance on using the website and general IT questions.
The company still works very closely with the dev agency that built their website too. They used the Sage Roots.io starter theme to build the site. Apart from loving my job, digging more into Sage and Roots.io has sparked my interest in deepening my development skills.
Since I get to work with the developers at this agency, I do feel inspired to acquire skills to match their senior dev. It would be nice to be able to handle more complex tasks instead of handing them off.
Apart from loving the team that I work with, I do love that my role consists of managing one website. That was one of the things that piqued my interest about this position. It was different than working at an agency handling different websites.
Obviously I understand that working in an environment where I am constantly working with different sites has an edge in terms of learning but I think working with and mastering this one website (which is complex enough – I learn something new every week) while honing in on my skills as I go is a great fit for me. I am overwhelmed easily and this situation really works.
I don’t feel stressed on a regular basis as I did freelancing.
Why did I create this blog?
The motivation behind creating this blog is to hold myself accountable, organize my thoughts, and have a plan for my educational web development journey as I have a lot to cover.
Even though I have been working with WordPress since 2020, I feel I am just lingering in the -intermediate- skill level and not really advancing.
At this point in time, I need to strengthen my backend skills. When I first learned WordPress, I learned by building a WordPress website from scratch using the Underscores theme. I absolutely loved this. However, in my career with clients I worked more with existing themes rather than building my own. No regrets about this considering most are simple sites and creating something completely custom, in my opinion, would not have been efficient. But I would like to build more.
I never stopped learning through troubleshooting this whole time though. Even the simpler sites have presented new problems that taught me more along the way.
Educational to-do list:
- Complete a Udemy Course I started – Become a WordPress Developer: Unlocking Power With Code.
- Finish Google IT Support Certification.
- Learn Laravel (Sage Root.io starter theme uses Laravel Blade).
- Strengthen JavaScript skills. There are many tutorials out there but I found I learned a lot already by following along Ania Kubów‘s tutorials. If anyone out there has JavaScript tutorial recommendations, feel free to share.
- Practice HTML & CSS & JavaScript by building out a simple site about my cat (I figure this is a good starting point – simple site).
- Once I build out this site, I will implement it on WordPress using the Sage Roots.io starter theme.
- Rebuild header of existing company website using Sage Roots.io theme.
- Read Professional WordPress Plugin Development.
- Read Building Apps with WordPress.
- Ensure I am using Git & Github as I build out WordPress apps.
- Learn Linux. I recently installed ArcoLinux on my personal computer.
I figure the Udemy and Google IT Support courses will likely be put on hold for now as I think I should focus on working within the Sage theme. Working with Sage specifically should be a priority. This list as a whole will likely change a bit as time goes on.
As you noticed, there is a lot in this list. Hence why I wanted to start this blog to make sense of what I am doing.
I think I will wrap up here for now.
I don’t know where I am going with this but thanks for stopping by! ✨
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