There was no boot camp, no degree program, no structured curriculum. I started where most designers of my era started — slicing layouts in Photoshop and converting them to HTML by hand. Table-based layouts. Spacer GIFs. The whole historical artifact.
Then things changed, the tools changed, and I had to keep up or fall behind. I chose to keep up. Badly at first. Then less badly. And eventually well enough to build real things.
The Forum Education
My actual education happened in forums. Someone would post a snippet. I’d copy it, break it, figure out why it broke, and learn something I couldn’t have learned from a tutorial. That hands-on destruction loop is still the fastest way I know to understand how code actually works.
I won’t pretend that approach is for everyone. It requires a tolerance for confusion and a willingness to sit with ‘I don’t know why this isn’t working’ for longer than is comfortable. But for me, the confusion was part of the learning.
Where WordPress Changed Everything
At some point, WordPress became the platform where most of my real work happened. Not just installing themes and plugins — actually building them. Learning the template hierarchy. Understanding how hooks and filters let you modify behavior without touching core files. Discovering that WordPress has a logic to it, and that logic rewards the people who bother to understand it.
That’s where I am now: deep in WordPress development, building a multisite network, writing my own plugins, working toward full-stack capability. The gap between ‘designer who writes HTML’ and ‘developer who builds systems’ is real — but it’s cross-able. I’m crossing it.
What This Category Is For
Design and Dev is where I document the work. Not just tutorials — I have no interest in writing content that’s already been written better elsewhere. But the specific problems I run into, the specific solutions I build, and the thinking behind design decisions that don’t fit neatly into a how-to post.
If you’re on a similar path — coming from design, learning development, figuring out WordPress, building something of your own — this is for you. We’re probably running into the same walls.
