National Coding Week: Meet Luka Alexander
Every day for National Coding Week, we’ll be sharing a blog about a technical person. Today, we’re featuring Luka who is a freelance front-end developer and one of our incredible teachers. Over the past few years, Luka has taught several cohorts and even taught our marketing manager Serena how to code!
What does your job involve?
I work on many different projects throughout the year- so it is incredibly varied. At some jobs, I spend 80% of my time coding and 20% in meetings or strategising with colleagues. In other jobs, it is closer to 30% coding, and the rest of my time is spent testing with users, collaboratively designing features or consulting on accessibility.
What’s your favourite thing about your job?
That I never stop learning. There is always something new to figure out, whether it’s new tech or a way of improving your code or your team dynamic. I also love getting to see the difference a well-made service provides for its core users. This can happen while partaking in user testing, or demonstrating software to users. Most teams I work in use some form of Agile development which often involves showing clients and other teams our work, which is a very collaborative process.
The most important experience I’ve had is when I was working on the Government’s beta services. I was able to sit in on accessibility audits and watch users with various disabilities use our service which provided invaluable advice on how to improve services for everyone. It’s a humbling experience, to say the least!
How did you start coding?
When I was in my early teens, MySpace was invented. It was huge among people in my age group, and it was possible to customise your profile using CSS. I would spend hours trying to add cool effects to my profile. After a while, this got old (along with the use of Comic Sans), so I would download and fiddle with the code from live sites to see if I could break it and fix it. Eventually, I started building my own sites for friends, and when I had finished high school I decided to go to university and study software engineering. On reflection, I would probably look into doing an apprenticeship instead. The best learning happens while doing, in a real-life context.
Can you share one practical tip about how you can start coding?
Practise, practise, practise! There are dozens of great courses out there but a lot of them rely heavily on the browser as a development environment. I found it more useful to have my code saved on my computer so I could reflect on it later or return to it when I run into problems. Also, turn off any plugins you downloaded for convenience and let yourself go wrong more. The more you go wrong, the more you learn!
How can we contact you?
Twitter: @lukacodes
Instagram: Luka_codes
Luka has taken over our Instagram account today — click here to watch Luka’s story.
