Web Development
< Sophia Projects with farag2/Sanctuary/Dmitry Nefedov
I started web development in 2013 but it was so hard for me. The best I could do was modify existing themes in CSS and HTML. Doing more gave me a headache. My experience and life experience was lacking.
In 2017, I worked for Al at AMLCSL and designed his website. I customized the best I could, mostly changing margins and colours and images from an existing theme.
I tried to volunteer designing websites for Vietnamese Associations in the Ontario. I failed because I was not skilled enough. I needed like 5-8 years more experience to design from scratch.
I bought Divi a similar tool like Elementor and still failed.
In 2024 after finishing school and doing team personal projects, I tried making a WordPress theme from scratch using YouTube. It worked but was out of date and not WYSIWYG enough. I was using the latest videos but they were 4-5 year old videos.
Al recommended me to use Elementor to design websites.
In 2025, Ben got me work to design a website for his family. I used Divi and it was just OK.
Reflection:
I needed to go slow and do what I like to build the brain to handle web development. Overtime building structure and more levels to handle stuff. Web development isn’t that exciting to push, push.
Growth:
Doing personal projects was the mover and enabled me to grasp web development in a fun and enjoyable way. Going head on doing web development is OK too but you get so burnt out for me.
Basically, the more enjoyable learning personal projects, you will one day learn the structure and techniques of web development here in Canada.
While you are doing personal projects, you might find supposedly new ways to develop things. But again programming is already done 70 years ago. Basically you are trying to find (write) the right code for the job. And that is the learning process and growth process.
The only fun way is to do personal projects. And that is fun and probably also limited. You might reach a state where there are no other interests or world problems you want to solve.
Then it requires more learning and exploring and growing.
So doing this and that will grow you overall too as a person.