.my-story

My journey so far

Hi, I’m John, and here I am with my wife Fay and daughter, Harper. I’m from London originally, but now reside in the leafy suburb of Oakwood in Leeds. My journey to becoming a professional web developer has been quite a long one. I started to learn to code properly in January 2021, but in the previous five years to that I setup and ran the website for my travel business on Wordpress using no code solutions such as page builders and plugins. I learned a lot about SEO, PPC and digital marketing, implementing many of the onsite SEO optimisations myself. Whilst working with an agency we managed to rank on page one for certain targeted keywords. In September 2021 I completed the Northcoders bootcamp and I’m now looking for my first full time position as a junior front end developer.

My interests as a junior developer

I love visual design and have particularly enjoyed learning CSS and the challenge of translating designs into code. For this portfolio site I used SASS for the first time alongside the BEM naming methodology and I’d love to build on these skills. I also want to take a deeper dive into CSS frameworks such as Material UI and Tailwind and utility first CSS. I am really interested in the JAMStack approach and the idea of headless architecture. I’d love to learn more about implementing headless CMS and headless ecommerce. So far I have been mostly using create-react-app but I would like to build on this by gaining more exposure to Gatsby and NextJS. I also plan to learn Vue to see how it compares to React.

Some other random facts about me!

I’m a trained barista and love a great coffee as well as food and drink in general! My chef heroes are Anthony Bourdain, Rick Stein and Keith Floyd.

I lived in Granada, Spain for six months and have a real passion and appreciation for Spanish food and culture. I’ve also travelled all across Central & South America.

I love real vinyl records and have a modest collection with everything from Neil Young to classic Brazilian 45’s and a lot of drum and bass among other electronic music.