My first exposure to code was back in year 2019 when I worked as a salesperson at a local industrial manufacturer called HAILIN POWER (https://hailinpower.com). We had an existing website which was developed at early 2000 without an SSL certificate — back then I had no idea what a SSL is — the website layout was really out-dated and it didn’t convery HAILIN’s brand image at all. So I talked to my management team with this idea of redesigning our website and explained why this is necessary. And, they agreed to do it.
We wanted to take this task in-house but no one in our company had a single clue about how to get it done. We ended up purchasing a website building tool (it’s like a drag and drop page builder) and I was assigned of this task and eventually found my away around this builder and set up a website. The final website was ok but still not what we wanted and we had no idea how to improve that. And the whole experience was really aweful, partly because the tool we purchased was really cheap and not well-designed. “There must be a better way” I talked to myself. That’s when I decided to learn HTML, CSS and then later discovered WordPress.
I have allocated many hours from my spare time watching tutorials on WordPress, HTML, CSS and JavaScript. After spending about one year on learning web development, entering into early 2020, I felt confident enough that I can redo our company website with WordPress (during off-clock hours). So I talked to my manager that I want to redo our company website from ground up. But I wanted to improve the product images as well, and since I’m pretty good with my camera so I decided to do some product photography before I dive into website development. I took the photos of all our products and editted them inside Photoshop.
After that, I started to build the new site with WordPress. Given that I didn’t learn any PHP yet, I reached for the hottest tool out there which was Elementor. Long story short, the website built with Elementor had a bad performance score. Then I rebuilt the website with Gutenberg & Kadence Blocks with some custom CSS. The new version has a big improvement performance-wise. And that is what you see now if you visit https://hailinpower.com.
I had a really fun ride working on this project, including figuring out things about DNS/CDN/Web Hosting, etc. To put it more accurately, I felt in love with web development and I wanted to pursue a career in tech. On top of that, I was really not good at sales even though I have many years of sales experience. So at March 2021, I left HAILIN, a company that I have spent close to 6 years and I cried that day (yah, I’m an emotional person and please don’t tell anyone :)).
After my journey ended at HAILIN, I took some time off but still tried my best to hone my skills on programming. Meanwhile, I started to send out tons of code emails to other B2B companies to pitch my web development service. I ended up doing two more WordPress projects (from May 2021 - September 2021):
- https://jacapower.com - built with OceanWP theme, Gutenberg and Kadence Blocks along with custom CSS.
- https://fjyabo.com - built with Oxygen page builder, Pods custom fields along with some PHP code snippets.
Around September 2021, I learned about this concept of remote work from my friend in Phillippine.