How I learned Design & web dev in a year and a half

Ismail Ghallou
5 min readMar 10, 2017

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This article was originally published on my personal blog Smakosh.

I started Learning Design 1st :

  • I learned Adobe Illustrator & Photoshop easily since I was playing with A. After effects when I was a lil boy.
  • I started practicing by Designing stuff for myself like, logos / User interfaces / business cards / social media banners / illustrations & editing pictures…
  • Some of my friends suggested to me to create a Behance portfolio & start publishing my works there, I did so & once I made a twitter account I started sharing my works there, I started getting clients all over the world .

Then I started learning web development, of course I started with front end development :

upcoming soon :D Edit : It’s Done : http://smakosh.com
  • I started getting some clients but unfortunately asking for a CMS templates from scratch which is really hard to do as one single developer, anyway I took the challenge and Designed the UI, coded it & then converted it to a wordpress template, sadly I used plugins all over to let the client be able to edit stuff easily which made the website really slow, http://singaporeview.com he then paid me more to remove my copyrights but still you can find my name on the style page :D http://singaporeview.com/wp-content/themes/kgs/style.css
When one of your clients removes ur name on the copyrights on the footer & forgets to remove it on the style page 😂😂😂
  • Also I made some websites using premium templates like this one http://desbro.net [domain & host expired].
  • I wanted to get into mobile dev too but I had no idea how to make a mobile app, so after a little research I found out that there is a software called Build Box that lets you make mobile games without any programming skills, you only need to design all the stuff & the drag n drop will do the work and your app is done, which was the tool I used to make Catch it 1.0 https://www.behance.net/gallery/38505463/Catch-it-10-My-first-android-mobile-game .
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.smakosh.atchit

1 Year has passed and I decided that I really need to get into back end dev :

  • I had a hard time thinking about what decision should I take, To learn Node js/mongodb (the MEAN) or php/mysql or something else (ruby on rails, django, JEE, ASP.net…) well at the end I went with php/mysql due to the decision of my dad who didn’t let me drop out from university and started learning it & as I always do, I learn the basics of the language (variables, loops, statements…) then I start directly practicing making web apps, I made some simple forms validations (upload, log in, sign up, submitting a form, sending mails…..)
    then I made some web apps like a Forum & an E-commerce : https://github.com/smakosh/Smartshop then an image resizer function since some of my friends wanted mine, they found the others hard to use etc… https://github.com/smakosh/image-resizer .
https://github.com/smakosh/Smartshop
  • while learning back end dev I made some works too like this responsive website for my friend https://luca-steeb.com & it was the first time I’ve used Git on ubuntu since the website back end uses Nodejs & I learned some stuff about npm & CLI :D
https://luca-steeb.com
  • But then in late 2017 I started learning the MEAN stack and made a node mvc todo app: https://github.com/smakosh/node-todo-app then made a Single one page mean app: https://github.com/smakosh/futuristic-todo-app/tree/connected (learned a lot about restapi, mongodb, nodejs & express js) and I’m still learning and going deep.
  • Switched to the MERN stack (React & Redux seem promising)
  • So what’s my next steps ? currently learning Learning about Machine learning & Neural networks
  • I understood how the perceptron, feed forward, convolutional neural networks work — It’s just math s— . still need to learn more about recurrent, generative adversarial neural networks & reinforcement learning as well.

And thanks to these guys for their useful videos :D :

And thanks to all my friends & family who helped me so much :D

you can view all my works on my website http://smakosh.com & more down bellow :

And if you want to support me on Patreon, i would never forget your help since i’m doing many non profit projects : https://www.patreon.com/smakosh

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Ismail Ghallou

A self-taught full stack developer, UI/UX & Graphic Designer, interested in neural networks & tech in general, learn more about me at : https://smakosh.com