Star Developer Series: Jonathan Z. White

#consonanceIsOne special day

Jonathan Z. White is a Javascript engineer at airbnb, former intern at yahoo, he shared his story with us on twitter during consonance’s one year anniversary. Here is his story:

Doing a #stories and Q&A session with @consonanceng, an amazing community of designers and engineers in Nigeria and across Africa. Here’s a thread on how I got into design and building products Feel free to ask questions 🙏 #ConsonanceIsOne

I got into programming late. My first experience with it was in high school, AP Computer Science. Funny enough, it made me feel discouraged about programming. 😫

The class was confusing. I had a hard time grasping what classes and objects were. Needless to say, I got a 2 out of 5 on the exam. 😬

After graduating high school, I decided to do a degree in Computational Media at Georgia Institute of Technology. Computational Media combines computer science with HCI (human-computer interaction). 👨‍💻

Despite my not-so-great not experience with programming in high school, I wanted to give it another chance. 🙏

Thanks to a scholarship, tuition was free for Georgia Tech. However, I still had to pay rent and other living expense, ~$18k a year.💰

My parents were not able to provide financial support, although they gave me lots of ❤️support, so I had to figure out how to cover the costs.😰

During my freshman year of college, I started teaching myself web development. Even though it was only basic HTML and CSS, it was *really* exciting to me. 😍Because, unlike in high school, I understood the concepts. 😮

A few weeks after learning HTML and CSS, I had an idea💡 What if… I could cover my school expenses by building websites for people?🤔

So I started reaching out to people and companies, offering to build them websites. Unfortunately, no one wanted to hire someone with zero experience and no portfolio.💩

One weekend, I made a post on Reddit. Something like… “I’m a professional web developer and I would love to help you build a landing page for free”. Emphasis on “professional”😉 I wanted to get some experience, even if it was unpaid.

For some reason, the thread blew up. I got tons of private messages. I did one free landing page and delivered it.

Then, I had another idea 💡What if… I could convert the rest of the private messages, into paid contracts🤔

So I followed up with the rest of the private messages, offering a discount on my “normal rate”. Remember, at this point, I had never done any paid work. So I had no “normal rate” 😄

Many people said no, but a handful of people were willing to pay me to build them a landing page. That’s how I started building experience and a small client base for my freelance work.🕺

It was actually thanks to the experience I built up from freelancing, that I got a front-end internship at Yahoo that freshman year🎉 My manager really took a chance on me. I will forever be grateful to her for that 🙇

So even though I had a few scary moments where my bank balance dipped below 0 a couple times that year, between freelancing and my internship, I was able to pay for all my school expenses🙌

From that year on, I kept freelancing. I found a niche with early-stage startups who needed both design and development work. As a result, I was able to hone both those skills at the same time.

And… Those experiences helped get me to where I am today.🐥 I work at @airbnbeng, I write on Medium (https://medium.com/@jonathanzwhite ), and I work on tons of side-projects (https://featherchat.com/ ) 🙏

Also, while freelancing was fun, it was stressful as well. Early on, I did such a terrible job building a web app for a client, that they refused my work and paid me $100 bucks in consolation money. 😨

Experiences like that 👆 motivated me to get better at my craft.

Q&A time! Happy to answer any questions that you might have🙆‍♂️

@nerocodes: Awesome!! Inspiring! How did you specify it was a landing page and not a fully functional website? I haven’t been able to land a deal that’s just a landing page so i end up using wordpress to build a website, and i don’t get to code which is what I want to do

Jonathan Z. White: I think it’s because my original Reddit post specified landing page. From there, I moved onto building web apps.

@nerocodes: Building web apps is my goal.. Can I do this with just front-end alone or do I also learn back-end?

Jonathan Z. White: There is definitely freelance work for just front-end. But some companies like to save money and pay one developer to do both. Get so good at what you do, people can’t say no.

@nerocodes: Thank you very much!! It’s a big help getting a professionals perspective, thank you!!

Jonathan Z. White: No problem. Happy to help 👊

@_withoutwax: Where do you see yourself in 5 years time?

Jonathan Z. White: I don’t have a 5-year plan but… I want to be in a place where I am working full-time on one of my own products and be working with a fantastic crew of people.

@_withoutwax: That sounds awesome I’m pretty sure you can achieve what you are envisioning right now Wish you best of luck!

Jonathan Z. White: Thank you!

Ekene Ashinze: How were you able to manage school, internship and freelancing at the same time?

Jonathan Z. White: Thankfully, all 3 of the things were never going on at the same time. It was always just 2/3 of them. Surprisingly, exercising helped a lot to keep me focused and provide separation between tasks.

KrypticMist: Given your experience and challenges you faced building up, what can you say kept you going?

Jonathan Z. White: Honestly, it was because I found something I loved doing. Design and code ❤️

Oluwaleke Fakorede hashCode: Thanks for your time, you really have had great transitions in your career. A question, are there any ‘trade secrets’ you discovered by yourself that you would like to share?

Jonathan Z. White: 1) The notion that designers can’t code and developers can’t design is flubber🙊
2) Having an “underdog” mentality can take you a long way in terms of drive and motivation.

@_withoutwax: … and a follow up question would be: if you were to go through this experience again (I hope not) how would you do it differently?

Jonathan Z. White: I would tell myself — “Find your tribe”. There are lots of people struggling to overcome their own challenges on their way to become a designer or developer. I wished I had reached out to people earlier to exchange learnings.

@_withoutwax: I am completely with you on that — I am a designer and developer myself and it is always amazing to find someone with similar interests and share experiences, tips, etc. I think it’s actually one of the most effective way to keep yourself motivated as well

If you have issues answering questions like ‘What have you done before’ during job interviews, I think you should consider doing free landing page gig like Jonathan, just a tweet is enough to do that😉.

You can reach out to Jonathan on twitter @JonathanZWhite

Thank you Jonathan Z. White for sharing your awesome story with us, we felt loved.

From Hamza Bashir, Tinuade Adeleke and Mayomi Ayandiran.

For Consonance Africa.