my cohost account has basically just been my #learningtocode blog. Mostly to whine, because it's a new skill and I'm not instantly good at it. I'm permanently burnt out from writing after five or so years of doing work for bullshit internet marketing firms ('firms' feels like giving them a legitimacy they do not deserve), my family's in debt and I feel like I have a goal to work towards now, so I feel a sense of urgency over changing careers. I'm learning to code because that just seemed to be the default "career change" thing to do, but I'm having some issues with it that I need you, my oomfies, to help me work through my thoughts.

I'm taking The Odin Project courses and also freeCodeCamp (mostly Odin but Javascript has been kicking my ass because im dum so I'm using freeCodeCamp as a supplement, also it's so obnoxious that it's in camel case). I blew through the HTML and CSS stuff, and honestly that's the stuff that I actually enjoy doing. Taking designs I mocked up in Photoshop (CS6!) and putting them to code is pretty satisfying. Which brings me to my question:

Should I pursue web development or web design??

When I started, I had the goal of doing Frontend Web Development because I thought it was basically just taking a design and then putting it down into html and css, but now I'm doing javascript and I'm just thinking "man do I even have the brain for this. i have to actually think logically" And I Still Have To Learn More Beyond Those Three Things.

I know this is also just an extension of me whining about learning 2 code, but it also made me think of actually learning web design, which I hadn't even thought about before I decided to pursue programming.

Because I kind of know design! I've been fucking around with Photoshop and other adobe stuff for a decade now (some of you have seen my work, though they're not really design related), and I help out my sister from time to time with work. She's an actual graphic designer and I've picked up A Bit of That over the years. Obviously this doesn't mean I'm hot shit, but it'll be easier for me to learn than programmin'.

That said, I'm also worried that pursuing design is gonna creatively burn me out in a similar way to writing. One of the reasons I picked up programming is because I wanted avoid having to spend my creative bandwidth on Businesses (I realize that this is also a naive way of thinking about coding, and honestly coding frustrates me in a different way as someone who's never had to learn it beyond really simple scripting for VNs and rpg maker).

I could also literally just learn both of these things and decide what I want to do for a living later, but I want to focus one.

I want the honest opinion of oomfs. Do I have the #grit and #panache to code? Should I learn web design or something? Should I give up and post hole?


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in reply to @sociohat's post:

As somebody who has been programming professionally for about 20 years now: coding is hard and nobody is instantly good at it. I still regularly encounter problems that I spend days beating my head against before I figure out a solution, and I'm constantly learning new languages or frameworks. The most important skill is just being able to stick with it. It never stops being frustrating, you just learn new techniques for dealing with the frustration.

Web design and web development are separate but still pretty closely related things. Even if you want to focus on one, it's still useful to know something about both. Every designer I know still needs to know a bit about development so they understand what's possible, and every developer still has to know a bit about design so they can understand what the designer's goal is. On smaller projects, it's pretty common for one person to do both of those things, and that's something else worth thinking about: would you rather work on a small team where you have a lot of responsibilities and have to do a lot of different things but have a lot of flexibility and control, or would you rather work on a big team where you have a specific task assigned to you and other people handle everything else?

Something else that doesn't get talked about a lot is: programming is a creative task, too. As soon as you get past doing simple, menial tasks, there's a lot of creativity that goes into solving difficult problems, designing complex systems, and writing code that is both efficient and easy to understand. There have been a lot of days where I basically spent all day just thinking about a problem and then wrote a few lines of code to solve it.