How I became a front end engineer

I started my tech journey in 2011. Seattle was a lush city with a thriving startup community. My husband and I just graduated college together with degrees in Visual Communications. We had a web and graphic design startup with a solid client base, and we were taken aback by how beautiful Seattle was.

I had humble roots starting in Seattle as a Starbucks shift supervisor. I hated every second of it, but it was interesting watching the Amazon and Microsoft workers come down in droves for their morning cup of joe. The Amazon workers were sad, pale, and rude. The Microsoft workers always had their shirts tucked in. I had such a simple perspective of the tech industry. I didn't know much about development other than hacking and WordPress.

Three months into living in Seattle I was asked to create an iPhone app for Hayley Quinn — UK’s best dating coach. The app was designed to generate text messages based on certain scenarios such as time of day, how many dates, anxiety level, etc.

We had a great working relationship and Hayley was a very long standing client of ours. I told Hayley I would do it for a one-thousand American dollars. We knew the risk was high since I had never done this type of thing before. The mobile industry was still very new – with it being iOS 3.0 at the time. I guessed it would take me about six to nine weeks, but again stressing that I really had no clue.

The biggest wall I hit wasn't the coding surprisingly. It was the fact that Xcode would only run on Macs. I only had a really old 32-bit Gateway laptop from 2006. It took me a week, but I somehow managed to convert it into a 64-bit Hackintosh. Lots of witchcraft went into doing that, with my laptop often getting very hot. It probably wasn't the best for my machine, but it did the trick!

Six weeks later I had my first app thanks to my hacking skills. I’ve always been good at winging it, but I was not very confident at the time. Needless to say we were all shocked that the app actually existed once it was released to the App Store. The app had a decent amount of steady traffic. I became obsessed with making apps. I would go on to create a half dozen flops for clients over the next few years which taught me a lot about the mobile space.

Eventually the texting for dating app was acquired by a company in Bellevue, WA called Guppy Media. They wanted a complete overhaul and asked for me to be the developer for the Android project and rebranding of the iOS application for Hayley Quinn’s dating app. I charged three-thousand American dollars this round, and had a hard deadline of six-weeks. Again, I had no clue how to develop for Android – a risk the CEO was willing to take based on my portfolio.

They ended up taking the app and making it feel lux and sexy. They wanted things like password protected “black books” where you could rate the girls and save their pics and info. They put a little money into advertising and let it fizzle out. The app went nowhere and eventually faded into the void.

During this time Seattle’s tech industry was really going BOOM! Amazon bought more buildings, Microsoft stretched out, Facebook and Google arrived and many others soon after. I was really starting to struggle with my startup. Clients were very demanding, and often would pay whenever they felt like it. The cost of living in Seattle was hard to manage with never knowing when my clients would pay, so I decided it was time to dissolve my startup and find work as a web developer.

Eventually I found myself at Sound Advertising Group in West Seattle. A previous coworker from Guppy Media suggested I come in for an interview. It was brutal, and I knew I didn’t get the job. I emailed the CEO a week later and asked if he had a chance to decide on if I had the job or not. Later that weekend, I received an email saying to come in on Monday to discuss terms.

It was really unexpected and I was ecstatic for the opportunity. I was hired on contract for three months pending project success. I would get paid thirty-thousand dollars per year for this project, with an opportunity to become full-time if the project didn’t tank. It was a fair risk in my eyes. I had great mentors who taught me computer science, Javascript, CSS, MySQL, and PHP.

The project didn't tank and I somehow saved the project. I got a promotion after three months and was hired on full time with a salary of eighty-thousand dollars per year. It wasn’t easy though. I had to muster up the courage to ask for full-time. At first it was a bit of the run around, but eventually I was awarded the promotion.

Turned out I was good at what I did! I went on to do so many cool projects in my first ten years of my career as a web developer. I've been really lucky to have gotten the opportunities that I had, and even luckier for the fantastic mentorship throughout the years.