My Unique Experience From Design to Full-Stack Development

It’s been a while since my last post. The reason for the so long pause is my ongoing learning of full-stack development. Don’t worry I’m still UX/UI designer:). But I am going through a really hard educational journey that I want to share with you today.

First, I want to remind the major reason why I decided to learn full-stack development. My goal was to be able to design and develop products myself. This is why I started this crazy educational journey that continues today.

I started my learning in November 2022, and I thought that it would be a great experience. But I was so wrong and here is why.

Development Breaks Your Design Mindset

Last year when I just started my full stack development education I thought that I am a senior designer and I can learn anything so let’s learn.

My very first block of education, was, HTML, and CSS. And I was lucky because it was the technology that I was learning. Previously, it was easy for me to learn something familiar to me already.

The only challenge for me was to understand responsive design because it was kinda hard for me, but I was able to handle it in the end.

Once I completed the HTML and CSS block, I moved to the team project. We polished the knowledge we got through the lectures and home tasks.

It was interesting and challenging, and it was the first time when I learned how to use GitHub commands for a team project works. It was a real-life experience very close to what developers do every day.

Once the team project finished, we moved into the next block of education which is called JavaScript.

And here is where the whole fun started. I wasn’t able to understand what is going on and how to use this knowledge.

Everything was so different from what I already knew that it took a long time for me to understand the basics of this new technology.

What was easier for me to understand from a design perspective, for example, how to build components and layouts. But it was misaligned with JavaScript and how it works.

This was true programming where I needed to forget everything I knew about design and start thinking about pure logic without any creativity, and freedom.

Imagine a situation, where you create your design, and layout, in Figma. You create a canvas, and components, and design small elements. You can move your elements out of your canvas and put them back into it.

This is what I call freedom in design. When it comes to programming, you are so dependent on technology that you can’t go beyond its limits.

It was pretty hard to understand. What are the functions, how do they work what are erase loops, etc.?

This is something that I haven’t heard from developers when I collaborated with them as a designer.

It was time when I realized design is a super visual thing, while programming is all about the logic inside your brain.

You have a small chance to see the result of your work in front-end development because you see the changes that happen while you code. But you don’t have any chance in back-end development. You need to understand your code.

It was a time when development started to break the whole logic I had previously with my design career.

Everything became different. I need to think differently, and I needed to create products in a new way. It was time when I realized why programming is so hard and a highly paid job on the market.

Design Is Limitless, Development Is Not

Is it a familiar situation for you when developers say that you need to redesign your component or change your design layout because of all the technology they’re using?

I understood why it happens and what are the reasons exactly during my education. When you design products, you use your creativity, and best practices to develop a beautiful picture that is going to be created by the tech team in the future.

It’s a design world you don’t limit yourself to asking if React or JavaScript will handle your design solution.

Your task is to design screens and connect them, so the final result would be just a concept. And this concept will be developed by a team of front-end and back-end developers.

And when you start to collaborate with them, you realize that talk about some limitations. Sometimes you don’t understand why you need to redesign some things because it’s easy for you to create them.

And here when I benefited from my education. Right now, when I design layouts, I am very logical and structural about the products I am working with.

First, I turn on my new developer mind and try to understand if I was developing this product how I would go with the structure and components of this layout.

If I see that everything is fine and doesn’t go beyond technology levels then I’m sure that my solution is OK.

So while development has some limitations, I have a strong sense of how to design products.

If you are looking to become a hybrid specialist, think about this step very seriously. Because you are going to learn a new world of terms, logic, and things that you have no idea as a designer.

If this is something you are up to, you need to do one thing. Forget about your design creativity, forget about your freedom. You will be dependent on the technology that you use. This is development.

Fortunately, there is a strong benefit if you can handle development education.

Similar to me, you will be able to design and develop products by yourself. This means that you’ll have more job opportunities and a higher paycheck in the end.

What you will need is a clear understanding and vision of your future career.

For example, I want to stay in the design industry, be a design mentor, and help people to learn design.

But along with that, I want to be able to code myself and go beyond design limits. I want my end product to be not the concept, but a real product that works.

Creativity Lack vs. Logical Opportunities

Now, I want to tell you how I feel during my intensive programming learning, and continuing to work as a UX/UI designer.

First, my communication with developers became better. For example, I can understand what developers are talking about and why they have some limitations according to my design solution.

Second, I design better solutions. I am still a big fan of design and creativity that we all use, but I am creative according to the logic of programming.

Do you remember that I mentioned that as a designer I lack creativity in programming? But in terms of the programming world, I see logical opportunities.

This is finally what I can do as a hybrid specialist. On one side, I see a huge creativity gap as a designer, but as a junior developer, I can see so many logical opportunities that I couldn’t imagine previously.

My major task today is to combine my new experience, and of course, to finish my education journey. I assume that I’ll finish my education this fall. I hope so.

Once I completed my journey, I’m very excited to work as a hybrid specialist. I don’t know any hybrids, so it will be my new challenge. Many designers promote development, and I checked many of them.

Unfortunately, most of them talked about HTML and CSS only. And you know one thing? HTML and CSS are not programming languages.

JavaScript is the programming language. I am currently learning and going to use it at my work along with React library.

So if someone will tell you that you need to learn HTML and CSS to become a programmer, this is a lie. If you’re serious to become a developer, you’ll need to learn way more things.

For example, the course I am going through right now is a full-stack JavaScript developer course.

I started with HTML and CSS and dived into JavaScript right now. I also learn React and Redux. The last chapter of my education will be Node.js.

Additionally, I have training on how to build a career, what knowledge to learn after my course is finished and so many other things.

So this is a really hard step in my career, but it is worth all the effort I am doing right now.

Even if I don’t understand something right away, I know that if I continue this path and start to practice more and more someday I’ll understand and everything will be perfect.

Previously, I had a huge gap in understanding how the development process works.

Right now I can see that there is a creativity lack in the development. And my goal is to become a solution to align these things together to remove all gaps and connect things between development and design perfectly.

Final Thoughts

If you are looking to become a developer or a hybrid, such as myself, you know, the things that will happen to you based on my personal experience.

And this is not bad this is just what you could potentially expect in your educational journey.

Design is a super creative career, but development is super logical which means you’ll need to change your mindset. But if you can handle it, the result of your education is worth your efforts.

So, if you are open to a new challenge, I would highly recommend preparing for the upcoming changes that you will face once you start learning development.

There is nothing scary about development. All you need to do is to understand that it’s different, but it’s still interesting as UX/UI design.