From Graphic Designer to FullStack Developer – Coding is creative.

I am a London-raised, Mexican-born graphic designer, specialised in typography and book design. I worked in publishing for 12 years and before moving to Berlin, I was a Design Manager, where I was working in designing and producing the books. Upon moving to Germany I started freelancing, since it was difficult to find a new publishing job with my level of German. I’ve only been living in Berlin for a year but thanks to Le Wagon, I have already amassed a large network of colleagues and friends and feel confident in developing more projects and goals for myself.

Freelancing gave me more time to, not only improve my German but also, discover more about the world of coding. I wanted to expand my current skill set as well as freshen up the staleness that sometimes comes with doing the same thing for over a decade! I wanted to learn something completely new that would still have some overlap with my creative background. At Le Wagon, you get a full overview of both the back-end and front-end of coding which helped me understand that whatever is being built needs to be attractive and easy for the user to navigate. This is where good design, and my background, helped with creating a working product that looked good and was straightforward to use. 

I went to a lot of meetups and workshops, as well as doing a lot of research online, to figure out if I really wanted to go all in. A lot of these workshops and talks were from Le Wagon and I realised they had a massive community which was welcoming, positive and kind. To newcomers and people (commonly women) who were told constantly that coding was an unattainable world for them, Le Wagon was the right type of confident and encouraging, actively helping diverse people to take the leap. I felt this when the staff would remember me (and my name) from previous talks or workshops and I didn’t feel ignored or made to feel insecure when asked about my lack of maths knowledge like in other places (which I won’t name). They were also incredibly helpful with my financing options and that was invaluable to me!

The best parts during the 9 weeks were the people of Le Wagon: teachers, staff and the other students. There’s nothing like overcoming difficulties with a group of amazing people doing it alongside you and supporting you along the way.

The main difficulty I faced during the bootcamp was learning completely new concepts and ways of thinking that sometimes made me feel like my brain was broken. It can be very disheartening and ego shattering but the constant exercises and flashcards helped me understand abstract ideas and just trusting the program because we kept hearing that one day it would click. When the layers upon layers of information and code finally made sense… that feeling alone made it worth it.

What helped me to stay motivated during the bootcamp was honestly seeing everyone else going through the same thing and the group supporting each other as well as the teachers and TA’s being so helpful and encouraging. I would not have been able to stay motivated by myself and, at least for me, a bootcamp was the best way to hold me accountable and help guide me into the deep, very deep, world of web development.

My batch was in its final stretch when COVID-19 hit so the post-bootcamp experience was a bit subdued with the whole world withdrawing, quarantining and transforming. However, despite this, I am proud to say that I am currently a teaching assistant at Le Wagon. I am able to give back from that rich learning environment, while also maintaining my design freelancing which is actually now more UX/UI oriented thanks to a more thorough product design sprint insight that is given within the Bootcamp.

The biggest lessons I learned from my experience at Le Wagon are the different ways of problem-solving! Apparently, learning to code from 30 onwards is considered a mature age in relative terms within the tech industry norm.
I was apprehensive as, thus, an “older” creative woman who was constantly reminded in insidious ways that I wasn’t ‘smart enough’ (as in, not being a math genius) to be a part of this world. Le Wagon fosters a diverse group of people of all ages and backgrounds which was the safe environment I needed to learn something hard and quickly showed me how far I could go. Your brain is an amazing machine and with the right guidance, I learnt to trust its capabilities.

My advice to any creatives wanting to learn to code: The process of coding is actually incredibly creative as it essentially just problem-solving, using different tools and languages. Creative people can offer so much because web platforms and apps need to also look and feel good and being able to understand and work with both sides can be very empowering. Learning to code is certainly an investment in a creative career. 

I am looking forward to being able to build things from scratch because I now know I can and instead of being intimidated with how to even start, I have a perfect starting point. I found a deep interest in back-end but while I built up even more knowledge in that area, I would like to find an overlap in my digital design freelancing with my newfound interest in front-end development.