Yesterday I listened to your interview on the Code Newbie podcast and really enjoyed hearing your story. After visiting your website I was really interested to see all the valuable articles you have. If you have the time I would love to do a mentoring session in order to ask you some questions.
My background: I studied digital arts and graphic design but ended up in a Photo Retouching role for 6 years. I always thought of learning to code and did basic HTML/CSS in my digital arts degree but never found resources interesting enough or I gave up when I got frustrated. I have been out of work for the past while trying to do a career transition living at family members.
I have purchased some courses on coding, I have been rigorously teaching myself over the last little while and have progressed much better than previously, though still a novice I can do most HTML/CSS and basic Javascript website interactions. I have always been the type of person to have an entrepreneur’s head and struggled in previous roles being managed by someone else. Though at first, my goal was to gain experience through a junior position I would, even more so, love to try and my first freelance client and gain experience that way.
I hope to understand what the absolute minimum I should have under my belt to get going is and have displayed as a website before I can try and find that first client. I am a bit of a perfectionist and have a vision for my website and projects but haven’t executed on them (apart from the design in Adobe XD) due to lack of coding knowledge (still learning).
I also hope to understand any ways of progressive learning so I can think of new solutions based on my current knowledge. I feel like sometimes I only know how to recreate the ideas in the video lesson or tutorial I did rather than think up something completely new using the same principles without googling the solution.
And lastly, I hope to understand where to focus my energy on that first client. I have always read books on this but as a real introvert I don’t spend much time out and have never tried networking or any of this myself.
I hope you get a chance to read this, and thanks for all the valuable content on your site!
Roadmap
- Find an audience to serve
- Start building trust and discovering problems you can solve
- Build 3 portfolio pieces that are similar to what you will build for clients