My Story (...and first ever blog post ever)

Hi there and welcome to my first ever blog post (ever).

Full disclaimer, I'm mostly writing this to get more comfortable with writing, specifically writing publicly, though hopefully there will be something relatable or of interest to you.

While I've had aspirations to start sharing some of the cool ideas and things I've learned for a while, I found it quite difficult to actually start. However, thanks to Ken Rogers' "Launch Your Dev Career" program, I've been forced to finally start by writing out my journey in becoming a developer. So here goes...

What I was doing before

I'll work backwards. Before deciding to become a developer, I was a product manager at a govtech startup. Before that, I was a customer success manager. Before that, I briefly did sales and before that I taught English in Thailand.

Why I got into coding

I've been somewhat into coding since I was a kid. Thanks to my dad, when I was little I told people I wanted to be a computer programmer when I grew up (even though I didn't know what that meant). I did, however, play a lot of videogames. Since many of those videogames were pirated, I had to get comfortable running applying patches and debugging when those patches didn't work.

Other than that, the only other early experience I had was when my dad gave me a book on Visual Basic in middle school, though I didn't make it far (the thing was in black and white and I had videogames).

Things picked up in high school when I took Intro to Programming and later AP Computer Science. Of all the classes that I took, I think I really liked those because of the satisfaction that it was pure logic and the computer always did what you told it.

In college, I moved away from coding and decided instead to major in psychology. I think it was partially because it was new and partially because everything seemed inherently interesting.

It wasn't until after college (while I was teaching in Thailand) that I encountered behavioral economics, now my favorite branch of psychology. That's also when I learned that all of these fascinating psychological factors turn up everywhere in daily life, a perfect example of which is the power of UX design.

I realized that tech and psychology are inherently involved and that I could leverage technology to have a real effect on bettering people's lives.

That was when I decided to move back towards tech (and coding) and have slowly been making my way back. After doing sales and product management, I just missed getting my hands dirty and doing the actual deep work, which is why I'm moving back into it now.

What am I working on now?

Right now, in addition to some freelance jobs here and there, I'm working on revamping my portfolio site (heathdaniel.com). I initially used a template (which now feels a bit cheap) and am working on rebuilding the whole thing (adding pages to explain my projects, an actual contact form, etc).

What are my goals?

My #1 goal is to deliver value to people. I want to know that my work is contributing to making the world a bit better for other people. More specifically, I want to get really good at crafting modern and thoughtful user experiences.

Thanks for reading my first blog post ever! Definitely leave a comment if you found anything in particular interesting, relatable, or generally comment-worthy 🤓