There Is No Age Restriction for Doing What You Love to do.
Read about a young developer who is making an impact with his developing and social media skills.
So let start ! what’s your background, and what are you working on ?
I am Jens, a 15-year-old passionate frontend web developer and designer, located in Belgium. The first time I got in touch with web technologies was when I was 12 years old, In 2015 at my first Coderdojo session. It’s an organisation where they learn children to program, every weekend on a Saturday morning. You had the choice between three categories: Scratch, Arduino (hardware development) and web development. I immediately fell in love with HTML and CSS. I even got more excited when I learned a bit of JavaScript. That was the beginning of a beautiful journey to a great future. Today I’m still learning and I specialised in frontend web development. I also got into web design, UI & UX design and I even made illustrations at some point. Today I work as a freelancer, I work both on client projects and personal projects. I also spend a lot of time on my Instagram account, (www.instagram.com/jens.codes), where I share my journey with a community of other great developers and designers.
What motivated you to be in this field/career ?
The fact that I love what I do, motivates me enough to keep practising and to not give up. This is why you should choose for a job you like, or even better: make a job of your passion.
What went into building your skill set through which you are making a living right now ?
I learned most of my skills myself. I think that’s the best way. We’re living in the twenty-first century, most of the people have internet and a smartphone, tablet or computer. With these tools you can start doing research about a field you’re interested in, all the information we need is online, it’s only a matter of finding it.
How have you grown more in your field and attracted work for yourself ?
I recently started doing daily small challenges, I share with my audience on my Instagram account. And that’s in my opinion, the best way to keep pushing yourself to the limits. Practice. Get inspired by other developers and designers and start building something. My goal with these challenges is to show people that programming is fun and that without a lot of code you’re still able to make nice websites and apps.
How come at such a young age you found your love in web design and also being a developer ?? Could share us how you started both ?
A lot of people ask me this and I always loved technology. It’s never too late, but also never too early to start. I want to motivate other people to start doing something they enjoy. I want that they realize that age doesn’t matter at all. You shouldn’t wait for ‘the perfect moment’, because there will never be one.
What are your goals for the future ?
I want to become an entrepreneur and own a company. Together with other people, I want to make the world a better place to live and give everyone the opportunity to attempt their passion, whoever you are, whatever you do and wherever you’re from.
What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced and obstacles you’ve overcome? If you had to start over, what would you do differently?
If there’s one thing I would like to change if I was able to go back in time, then it’s probably ‘being more enterprising’. I’m 15, I have plenty of time and nothing to lose. I wish I was actually trying more, earlier.
Have you found anything particularly helpful or advantageous?
Other people, who motivate and inspire you, are the key to getting started. ‘Learning from experience’ is the most effective way to be successful. Fail. Fail. Succeed.
What are your advices for users ( our community people ) who are just starting out their careers ?
Don’t let anything or anyone stop you from reaching your dreams. If you work hard at the start, you’ll be fine in the end. Age doesn’t matter, as I said before.
Any inside tips for users that how to increase their followings on social media ?
There are only two tips that work:
- Create good content
- Be consistent. What I mean by ‘good content’ is content that people like, that’s useful, good imagery, and straight-forward.
