A friend once told me ‘why don’t you try web design?’. I’ve always learned the tough way. More like, I always needed a push to exert force with everything I do. I joined the marine academy here in Nigeria right after my university. I was training to be a navigation captain. Here, I learned discipline and how to be a gentleman. It shaped my life and I could live my life under any circumstance (tough, cold, and heated times).

All along, my long time friend was having all shades of fun being a designer. While I was going through tough drills back in the academy, my designer friend was taking vacations and posting his lovely web jobs on social media. So I always consoled myself that I’ll be a captain and sail all over the world. I told myself I’d find more fun being a sailor.

My curiosity will reach out and made me always yearn to view web designs online. After leaving the marine academy, I got a job as a System Analyst in an higher institute. I guess I wasn’t going onboard a ship anymore. I guess my sailing dreams started to fade away. My friend reached out and told me several times…’why don’t you try this web design?’. He will say ‘you have the brains to learn these stuffs on your own’… ‘self-tutor is the key bro’.

So I started out with video tutorials ranging from PHP, Html5, Css3, Java and more. It was getting boring after a while that I had to quit. I told myself maybe web design wasn’t meant for me. I tried to console myself that I should try go onboard and sail around the world. I was reaching my doom here.

Then my friend noticed I stopped learning web. He advised that I should follow a particular web specialty and stop being Jack of all trade. I always fancied front-end design so I started studying Html5, Css3 and every other web tool that will enhance my User Interface design. I’d study and practice the whole day and into the dead of the night. My weekends weren’t mine anymore as I will spend them at my friend’s apartment; where other web designers and developers also lived. Everybody in the apartment would be glued to their laptops. Keyboards tapping. Coffee brewing. Small talks to keep people up. Everybody in the apartment was all about a breakthrough in the web world. The apartment was later named the Incubator.

I was so bent and determined to get my web ninja skills on the run. I’d sleep on the couch because I didn’t want to be so comfortable sleeping on a nice mattress in the bedroom. I always knew I had to learn through this in the tough way. This was my primary training back at the marine academy. Basically, now I design responsive frontend web pages from scratch. And I still send out my designs to my designer friend for review. I hope someday he’ll know what he did for me.