Ten Years

So long, and thanks for all the fish! The end of an unexpected career in web development.

I was not hacking websites together in my youth. I didn’t know what a browser was until age twenty-five. I was fairly tech-averse, definitely not an early adopter of anything. I followed up a double major in English and Cinema Studies from the University of Toronto with a course in screenwriting at the Vancouver Film School and a parade of part-time customer service work. At a certain point, I wanted to be a librarian. But no one was hiring librarians. They were hiring web developers. I figured I’d try learning web development.

My family still thinks this is hilarious.

A couple of weeks later, I was sitting in the first of two evening courses from an organization called Ladies Learning Code. I’d installed the recommended text editor and made a change to the code, turning the background blue or something. Nothing happened. A friendly mentor suggested I “try refreshing the browser” and I had no idea what she was talking about. So I asked the first of many, many, many questions in my web development education:

What’s a browser?

Look, there’s a technical answer to this. You can get pretty deep in the weeds. But basically, it’s the thing you use to access the internet. The thing that requests documents from the World Wide Web and displays them on your device. It can also display local files from your device, like the in-progress work for that course.

The personal answer is that, for me, the browser is a life preserver. I was drowning and it kept my head above water. I genuinely don’t know where I would be without it.

One year after taking “HTML & CSS for Beginners: Learn to Build a One Page Website From Scratch,” I started working professionally as a web developer. It was part-time, mostly Wordpress, freelance work. But it was paid work, which I desperately needed.

I was a few years into my career when I decided I should move into a full-time role where I could learn from more experienced developers. I was hired at a company where I was the only female developer (not just at that time, according to a co-worker, but in the entire history of the company). I was hired at an intern rate and told this would be re-evaluated in three months. After three months, no one spoke to me about my role and I was too scared of getting fired to draw attention to myself, so I continued at an intern rate for far too long.

When COVID hit, I went back to freelance work for more flexibility. Big life changes were happening. I ended up moving from Canada to the UK. Then a company I had applied to work for a few years prior emailed me out of the blue to see if I’d be interested in a new position they had available. I said yes. The fact they already had several female developers working there was a factor in this decision.

Being Loud and Curious

Funnily enough, it would be over a year before I worked on a project directly with the company that hired me. Because I was UK-based, it made most sense for me to jump into a staff augmentation contract with a bigger organization that also had UK-based employees.

A few other developers joined the team right around when I started. That allowed me to onboard like a full team member, not just a contractor, which was a bit of good luck. Even better luck: one of the new developers was Reem Hamoui.

If you’ve ever met Reem, you’ll know how easy it is to become friends with her. Living in a new country, during COVID, new friends were few and far between. At some point, as part of introductory chat, I described myself as quiet and curious. She responded that she was loud and curious.

A lightbulb went off in my head.

So many people I admired in the web development industry were loud and curious. If they weren’t loud, I would never have found them.

The last half of my web development career was spent trying to get louder. I asked more questions, gave internal presentations, and wrote blog posts. I learned more in that first year of being loud than in the preceding five combined. My career progressed rapidly. I reached senior developer status.

Over time, “loud” got easier. But “curious” got harder.

There was no moment of perfect clarity when I knew I was done. It probably happened before I was aware of it. I knew I was tired. Not a satisfied, what-a-full-day-of-work tired. A numbing, struggle-to-get-out-of-bed tired.

I went down to a four-day work week. For the first little while, I used my extra day off for sleep. I felt a bit less tired. I had a long list of personal web development projects that I figured I would eventually get to when I stopped sleeping.

A year later, I hadn’t touched that list and I wasn’t using the extra day for sleep anymore. I was writing.

Something other people do

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the rekindling of my interest in writing happened around the same time I purchased a Humble Bundle of Terry Prachett’s Discworld series. It’s pretty much impossible to read those books and not feel creatively energized.

I’ve always loved reading. But from a young age, I thought of writing as something other people do.

I could write in a journal. I could write essays. I could write a blog post. But creative writing? That was something other people did. The Terry Prachetts of the world. People who were bursting at the seams with fascinating characters and clever lines and richly detailed imaginary worlds.

Then again, ten years ago I thought of web development as “something other people do,” too.

Now, I’m not under the impression anyone will ever hire writers like they were hiring web developers in 2016. But I’m taking the money and confidence I got from web development and giving myself a little writing sabbatical.

Because writing is something I do.