How I went from being a Food Safety Consultant to a Front End Developer and UX Engineer
In the words of a famous Dr. Geller, the secret is “Pivot, Pivot, Pivot!”
Since my childhood in the 1980s, I was completely fascinated by the world of computers. It started when I saw the movie Tron at a movie theater. It was one of the most mesmerizing things I had ever seen. The movie immediately prodded me to explore the mysterious computer world (unknowingly, it also must have left a compulsion for motorcycles too, but I discovered that many, many years later).
After lots of saving, and lots of harassing my parents, I got my hands on an 8-bit Amstrad CPC 6128 with the cutting edge technology of a floppy disk drive included.
It was a bulky, sluggish, but utterly wonderful piece of engineering. I won’t say I’d immediately found my true calling. Like any other child, I just wanted it to play games—all of which I can still recall vividly. But every time you turned on the computer, you had the following text looking back at you enigmatically from the home screen: “Basic 1.1. Ready.”
For a child with natural curiosity, I immediately wondered: “what could I write below the “Ready?” After a lot of reading magazines, and even more trial and error, I managed to build four screens of a wannabe adventure game, based on the movie “Frantic” with Harrison Ford. Sadly, increasing difficulty and a lack of motivation took a toll on my project, which was axed so I could focus on school and other games.
At this point, I jump ahead from 1988 to 2000. For over a decade, I had zero to minimal computer interaction. I started studying Food Science and the syllabus had a Computer Science class. After all these years, I am in front of a computer again (now a PC), and it has a graphic interface with buttons and menus on the screen! No more typing, just clicking!
Then a Brave New World came: 28kbps, Netscape, HTML 4.0, IRC, Winamp, Limewire. Again, due to lack of time and motivation, I was just using all these wonderful technologies for browsing and downloading. But when you browse, sooner or later you find yourself in a situation where you start reading last night’s sports results then, eight clicks down the road, you are reading a HTML tutorial.
Fast forward again to 2017. I had been working as a Food Safety Consultant since 2003. My daily routine consisted of lots of paperwork about Food Safety Management Systems (that is, working on information translated into forms — A LOT of forms). I tried to use different fonts, customized Word styles, subtle borders, but alas—my clients are just interested in keeping the dreaded Salmonella away. I had the best looking forms in the industry, but nobody to appreciate them! The mundane aspect of the paperwork kingdom was killing a bit of me on the inside everyday, making my therapist plant the seed of a career change (forever grateful for the gardening, Debbie).
A good thing then, that I kept the same habit of browsing A LOT since the early 2000s, because I bumped into a sponsored post on Facebook for an online educator offering the opportunity to gain a full scholarship in Front End Web Development. As you have seen, computers were always a part of my life. But they had always been just a hobby—whether building simple websites or repairing hardware problems. They were a thing that friends and family were always saying “Oh! You are really good at this”. And I always had the same answer:
I am good at this but I don’t know how it really works. I can’t really understand what is under the hood. I just have the patience to Google what you asked me and try some of the proposed answers
So when I saw the “challenge post,” I saw it as the way to perhaps finally understand what web pages are made of, and with the words of a famous Barney Stinson I said: “Challenge Accepted!” So, I applied to Udacity and their Front End Web Developer Nanodegree program. The application process was straightforward and demanded a short answer on “Why do you want to do a Front End Developer course?” I struggled for a short answer (unfortunately you are now actually reading the rather longer version). After some time I received an email saying more or less “we are sorry but your application was declined”, so I thought “Hello Listeriosis my old friend,” “life goes on,” and other cliches. But the next day, I got an email saying… “sorry you received the wrong email and you are welcome to join the challenge!!”
And that was the start of a wonderful journey. A wonderful ten months when everything else was crumbling to pieces on a personal and professional level. The program itself was full of “a ha!” moments (I mean that as a revelation of how things work, not to be confused with an 80’s pop band from Norway!). I was really learning the subtle art of Front End Development, and I did it in a practical and methodical way that kept my interest throughout the challenge. Long story short, I successfully completed the challenge and for reasons unknown to me, I got the full scholarship from Udacity!
From February 2018 to August 2018 I had to learn A LOT of things! Both interesting and difficult at the same time. There was more than once that I almost gave up. There was a project to be submitted where you had to build a classic tiles memory game. Syntax errors, logical errors, design errors, seemingly unionized with the sole purpose of returning me to the predefined path of the Campylobacter pathogen (Fun fact of the day: never wash poultry with water over the sink, you’ll just spread millions of Campylobacter cells all over your kitchen top).
But by that point, I knew that the well-planned process of Udacity’s online program would make it clear to me: there is a concise logic behind Front End and, if you understand it, you can build whatever comes in your mind without being confined to the ready-made Wordpress template that you bought. Self-motivation is important and really helped me, but if it wasn’t for my wife—who believed more than I did that I could finish the Nanodegree program, and provided assorted motivational butt-kicking—I probably would have quit. Thankfully I was able to get my Certificate in August and celebrations ensued!
Before even finishing Udacity’s Nanodegree program I had told my story to various friends over dinners and beers (you are not alone, dear reader. Many have suffered through this long story). Then, Alex, a friend who works in the tech industry told me “You’ve got to meet Socrates. He is a Front End designer and I think you’ll get along nicely”. After some meetings (secret: he was right, we did get along well), I landed my first serious task in the tech world: redesign a mobile and web application for an accounting services firm. I was bombarded with new words by the minute: mockups, Figma, The ionic team, native, Sketch, responsive design, constraints, etc. Again, for reasons unknown to me, they liked the final result, and soon I was offered a job in their company: Quintessential SFT.
With haste and moves worthy of Flash Gordon, I closed the chapter on being a Food Safety Consultant. It’s been some months since I did, and I try to practice what I preach: excellent design, deep UX research, and optimum development. I am fortunate to be in a company that lives and breathes these notions. In this timespan, I got involved in interesting creative projects that made me eager for more. Is it early to say it was the right move? Yes. But, am I absolutely positive it was the right move? Again, yes.
So then we come to the million dollar question: can I become a UX engineer overnight? The answer is definitely no. Before changing careers, you have to read tremendous quantities of articles, tutorials, books, and you must talk with people already doing the job. You have to have empathy in your everyday life, so you are able to understand users and their needs. You have to try to make beautiful things with your computer, no matter how small and trivial a task is —whether it’s your email signature, your Instagram photos, your cover photo, or a four page Word document. You have to take a course that will guide you through concepts and ideas on your field of work (again, I cannot recommend Udacity’s Nanodegree Programs highly enough), and finally: Buy the ticket, take the ride!!
Thanks for reading against all odds a TL;DR text! You can follow me on Behance, and see what we can do on our website.
Editor’s Note: This article is the sole work of the author. Its views, findings, and conclusions do not necessarily represent those of Udacity.
