I love tags in a document, labels in my pantry and constants in my code. And in my life. A huge constant is my husband. My kids are variables. I used to write poetry. Naming things is hard. Poets and programmers would both confirm. Tagging things is easier. So how to tag myself to give you a good grasp of who I am? #student #teacher #coder #writer #gamer #housewife #designer #debugger #researcher #cook #mother I could go on. So could you. But what matters the most is being a good person. I am a good person. The one who fails. A lot. But learns from that and moves on. It's always about moving on. In the field of technology especially. And that is suitable for me.

Did you really know at the age of 18 what career you should pursue? I was sure mine will be something language-related. So I took a linguistic major in high school. Then I backpacked and left my country to discover the opportunities Budapest has for me. I got my first degree as a Hungarian literature and linguistics specialist. By that time, I was constantly promoted at the apartment company where I was working part-time. They offered me a leading position in 2016, but I refused. It would have been a full-time job, and I just got the letter from a university: I was accepted for a free 3 years long Master in Education. So I studied further to become an English-Hungarian teacher. I wish I knew how much better it feels to write in a computer language back then. But I thought the teacher's roadmap was for me, so I went for it. And when I started to work in Hungarian education, I realized I couldn't be further from myself. That profession was based on sticking with the old, rather than embracing the new, my colleagues hated technology developing around us, and all my creative efforts to implement modern approaches to children's education failed. Not to mention the salary that wasn't reaching the amount I paid for rent, or the amount I earned part-time ot the above-mentioned company. During this time I was blogging about my views, and with that customized WordPress site, my interest has turned towards web development in 2021. I started to give lessons, just like every underpaid teacher does, and I could use my technical skills and creativity to make my tutoring business profitable. Then a friend of mine asked me a favor that ended with building a fully functioning webshop and managing the whole technical and marketing side of her business all alone, with googling and learning along the way. By that time it bacame clear: what I truly enjoy is sitting in front of a computer all day, every day, googling solutions, reading software documentations, trying out things is my code editor. A year later I returned to this magical place called Transylvania, and I have no intention to leave again. I'm working on my developer skills day after day. But being a so-called self-thought programmer is not an easy road to take. The biggest challenge for me is not the lack of motivation or commitment, but the lack of navigation along the way.

Youtube told me a few years back that the only thing I need to become a web developer is a basic knowledge of HTML, CSS and JAVASCRIPT. But that guy told me many lies before, so I did proper research on the subject. I've come across this roadmap that you might be familiar with. Okay, I thought, this looked a bit different. But I rolled up my sleeves. Took them one by one. Got familiar with the terms first. Gosh, it felt like a map without a road. It still feels like one. I still have no idea how to work with caching or how to measure performance. And my projects are so colorful, it's like they were not relevant to one specialty. Because I did what I enjoyed the most. I've built vanilla websites (I mean, those without any libraries or frameworks). Then I learned a little bit of React, and started to build single-page applications. I was having fun playing with 3d in Three.js. But then I discovered Next.js, and I love how easy it is to develop certain things in it. I love their solution for routing, it makes so much sense for me. And I've learned a lot about rendering-related issues. Fetching feels also easier. And although I didn't have enough JavaScript knowledge before jumping into the pool of React, I learned by doing. And when I felt I was missing something, I did a 2 weeks challenge of JavaScript only.