Here is the situation: I am at the end of my 3rd year of university, watched a seminar about job hunting in Japan organized by the Career Center of my school then I realized I need to start being serious about my future career as well. Afterwards, I accidentally stumbled upon a YouTube video made by @Craftzdog on making your own portfolio website.

This is the video:

Long story short, I was hooked. Amazed at how he made such an amazing website to showcase his work. I came from a background of little-to-no knowledge on Website development at all. Sure, I have joined one class back in 2021 to which the result is the lackluster clinic office website you may have seen in my Work page. Outside of the class, I made no progress on improving my JavaScript coding abilities or touch upon web developing again. I then follow along coding together with Takuya while watching the video, realizing how cool JS is. The least I could do is start at the beginning from scratch and type in rhythm with him to get to know the code better since I was mesmerized at how clean and minimalistic the website looked.

So, this is what a full-stack developer does, or at least partially what he or she typically do at work. The work that went behind every nice website on the Internet is enormous to say the least. This portfolio website, albeit very minimalistic, takes quite a bit of coding to do. Even with the use of an external modular design library like @Chakra-UI which already takes half of the optimization job for a sleek-looking user interface.

While most of the code structure of the website is written by Takuya, I made sure to only use the barebone skeleton of it, which is the general look and feel of the website. Any special modifications or functions are what I experimented after hours of debugging on my local server. The language swap feature between English and Japanese, the resizable layout for different viewing experience on multiple devices and the content of the page as well.

I always liked the idea of having a personalized website about yourself. With the potential of it being a marketing tool for others to know who you are and what have you been doing. I think it is a self-learning experience and a tool for you to reflect upon your past endeavors.

I have more respect for developers now after experiencing coding in JavaScript by its variant: Next.js and more generally, React.js. Being a full-stack developer was and always be hard in my opinion, but I especially experienced it now first hand, just barely touching the surface of the responsibilities in their line of work. It is a tough hurdle to pass and as of this point, I am just a minor coding newbie who loves tech on the side of being a user more than a creator.