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

5 min readMar 10, 2017

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 :

I learned the basics : html/css/js & Made an unresponsive one page website, then a responsive website with my own grid system.
Then I learned some js Libraries like Jquery and then in 2017 I learned angular 4 and I really liked Typescript.
I learned some Front end frameworks as well like Bootstrap, Materialize, Bulma, Lostgrid and I later made my own Unnamed.
I learned Scss and I switched to Sass once I learned Pug (named Jade in the past).
I launched then my first ever website made with bootstrap http://smakosh.com it looked like this at the beginning https://www.behance.net/gallery/38527083/Personal-website-2 then this https://www.behance.net/gallery/40368429/Personal-website-3 and again I redesigned it & used Materialize instead : https://www.behance.net/gallery/42075389/My-Portfolio-websites-redesign and now I’m redesigning it again lol :D (It’s done) — currently recoding it as a MEAN app — .

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

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 .

I also played with the Ionic framework and made a bad hybrid mobile app https://www.behance.net/gallery/40555245/Smakosh-Portfolio-Android-App (it’s a static app and I’ll remake it ASAP using React native or Nativescript).

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 .

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

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

My elder brother, Anas Mazouni, Abdelmoujib Belmadani, Andrei Juan, My dad, Luca steeb & many more …… & thanks to Haytham Chhilif for helping me out on these articles :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

Written by Ismail Ghallou