S2E15: Community Development to Frontend Development with Luisa Morales

Laurence:
Hey, it's Laurence Bradford. Welcome to Season 2 of the Learn to Code With Me podcast, where I'm chatting with people who taught themselves how to code and are now doing amazing things with their newly found skills.

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Hey listeners, welcome to the Learn to Code With Me podcast. I am your host, Laurence Bradford. In today's episode, I talk with Luisa Morales. Luisa is a frontend developer at the NYC based agency Stealthwerk. Before teaching herself how to code, Luisa was working in community development overseas in London as well as here in the U.S. In our conversation, Luisa shares her windy path into tech, including how she started and stopped multiple times, how she made the jump from intern to employee at the company she works at today, and much more. Remember, you can get Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, at learntocodewith.me/podcast. Enjoy!

Hey Luisa, thank you so much for talking with me today.

Luisa:
Hey, thanks for having me.

Laurence:
So to get things going, could you introduce yourself real quick to the audience?

Luisa:
I'm Luisa, as you said. I am a frontend developer at a company called Stealthwerk. We're a tiny team, it's only four of us. We're based out of the Lower East side in NYC. I'm a self taught programmer. I've been programming, I guess professionally you could say for a year, but I went to a tech focused high school, so tech's always kind of been part of my life. I just decided to quit my job and got an internship at the company I'm working with now. That pretty much sums up most of the things in my life right now.

Laurence:
Oh that's so cool. So you went to a tech focused high school?

Luisa:
Yes. I went to high school in Long Island City in New York. I was born in New York City. It's called Information Technology High School. Our classes actually had to do with building a website using Dreamweaver and learning Flash and Photoshop. Our English class, we actually had to build out our own website and put up our English papers and stuff like that on the website. Then people around the world would edit it. It was pretty different, but at the time I didn't really understand that what I was doing was actually programming and that it could turn into a career. I think I was too young and administration just didn't push it on us really. I kind of assumed it was just another skill that I had to learn and other kids were doing the same.

Laurence:
Yeah, wow. That is so interesting that you were building websites back in high school and didn't really realize the value of it. I'm just curious, you went to this technical high school and then what did you study in college?

Luisa:
In college I studied Economics and I did a minor in Law and I did take some Computer Science classes, but because my focus was on Economics, I was going to do a dual major in Computer Science and I managed to declare it my junior year, but then I got into a program at the London School of Economics and since I wanted to pursue Econ, I decided to accept the offer and so I moved to London instead and dropped the CS major. Which looking back, I’m like, “Maybe I shouldn’t have done that,” but I did.

Laurence:
Well hey, you’re still working in tech today and you wouldn’t be who you are today if it wasn’t for that experience, right?

Luisa:
Very true.

Laurence:
I totally jumped ahead to college but I actually want to go back to high school. I’m just curious, was there something that drew you to go to a technical high school or did it just kind of happen by chance?

Luisa:
It actually did happen by chance. There was this guy in my class that had heard about the school. So we were actually the first incoming class. It was a brand new school. It was meant to turn into a specialized high school, kind of like Stuyvesant or Brooklyn Tech or Bronx Science. This guy was a classmate of mine and he was going around talking about the school and I was like, “This is fun, I love computers and yeah I’ll check it out.” So I applied and I got accepted. That’s kind of how I ended up there. It was a really great experience. We would take apart Macbooks because we had a huge endowment from Apple actually and the city of New York. Then people took advantage of the money that was given to the school so we actually ended up losing pretty much all of it because there was corruption going on which was really unfortunate.

Laurence:
Oh man. Well that is unfortunate, but it does sound like overall you had a pretty good experience there and you're doing good things now. Yeah, that's interesting, I was wondering about that when you first mentioned it. Jumping back ahead now, you were in London. You got accepted into a program at the London School of Economics. Then, what kind of happened? Did you realize you didn't want to work in Economics?

Luisa:
No. Actually, I find a lot of things in life are down to chance. What ended up happening was when I was in college, I was really into the euro and the European Union and what it represents in history and its economic impact, how it came to be, all these things. When I was in school I actually wanted to work at the European Central Bank, but I found out that I couldn't do that because I'm not a European national and aside from marrying someone and becoming an EU citizen, chances were that wasn't going to change.

Since it was pretty much the only thing that I wanted to do in Economics at the time, I decided to switch and I was interning with a co-working space in London. I kind of just got into the idea of the economic impact that startups have in the local environment where they're located and how they can impact the world at large. That kind of is where Economics brought me into startups. I started doing more marketing and social media stuff, content management type of things for this co-working space and working also on helping startups raise funding. From there, I actually got a full time offer with the co-working space but unfortunately, during one of my trips, I ended up getting arrested for having pepper spray in my carry on luggage.

Laurence:
Oh no, oh my goodness.

Luisa:
Yeah. So that's not the worst part. I ended up getting arrested and in my visa application, they asked about a criminal record. My police report said that I didn't have a criminal record because it was considered a caution, mainly because you can have pepper spray in New York and it's a form of self defense. But the UK doesn't look favorably on that. So I put that I didn't have a criminal record on my visa application, which is fine except once my visa got processed, they changed the rules around it, stating that even if you had a parking ticket, that was considered a criminal record, so you had to declare it. Because I hadn't done so, the government said that I had lied to them and they banned me for 10 years.

Laurence:
Oh my goodness, from the entire EU?

Luisa:
No, just from the UK thankfully.

Laurence:
Okay. Totally getting sidetracked here, but were you at an airport when they found it? What was the, it was in your bag?

Luisa:
Yeah, it was actually really silly. I was packing up the apartment that I was in. My boyfriend and I were moving somewhere else. So I was packing up my stuff and he kind of just asked me, "Is it alright to put this in your bag?" And I said, "Yeah, it's fine, it's not an issue." I thought I was going to put my bag through bag check, but when I landed in New York I wanted to be able to leave right away. So I wanted to take it through as carry-on. It just set off the alarms through security. I had no clue that pepper spray was that illegal. I even asked the cops, "Can I just throw it away? As if it was like lotion or something, can I just throw it?" They're like, "No, this is as bad as if you were carrying a gun."

Laurence:
What? That's insane. That's so crazy that they would consider it the same level as having a legit firearm or something. That's nuts.

Luisa:
Yeah. So their explanation is you can blind someone with it. So I suppose I could have, in some cases you could attack a flight attendant or attack the pilot.

Laurence:
Oh yeah, it totally makes sense they wouldn't let you bring it on a plane, and I hope they wouldn't let it on a plane. And then to ban you for it. That's a lot. I mean, not bring it on a plane, sure that makes sense. You're not allowed to bring a lot of stuff, like a razor to shave your legs.

Luisa:
Yeah, but they let you throw those out.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's so wild. Good to know, everyone listening. Don't bring pepper spray to the UK or whatever.

Luisa:
Yeah, don't do it. You will get arrested.

Laurence:
Oh my goodness. Anyhow, so that turn of events happened, which must have changed a lot in your life, right? With your plans of going back and working there.

Luisa:
Yes. So I actually ended up losing my job because I couldn't work remote, which made total sense because I was doing the community building and working mainly on growing the organization locally and building partnerships. So I couldn't do that if I wasn't in the UK. So I ended up having to train someone that I brought on board as an intern. I think she's actually still working with the company today, which is great. So I trained her while being in New York and they were all in London. I was just like, "Yeah, I guess that's it. Bye." So I lost my job really suddenly. That's when I decided to learn to program.

Laurence:
Wow, okay so, I kind of love the fact that you're laughing about it now. Even though it's not funny, there's some lightheartedness to it.

Luisa:
It took awhile for me to get here.

Laurence:
Didn't happen overnight. Oh man. At least it's just the UK not the EU right, it could always be worse.

Luisa:
Oh yeah, it could always be worse.

Laurence:
It could always be worse. It could have been a lifetime ban or something. Okay so basically, you lost the job, had to come back to the US. Was it because you didn't have any career options at that point? What sort of drew you back into tech?

Luisa:
The thing is that I could have gotten another job. I did eventually just end up doing that. At the time, I realized that the only thing that would have kept me from continuing down the path I was on was to have actually just lost that job. And to have been basically forced to move back to New York. I took the time to kind of reflect on that and realize how programming was something that I'd always wanted to do but I'd always just kind of made reasons to do something else. There was always something that was maybe a better opportunity or easier to do, like happened in school. There was nothing kind of holding me back from doing it this time so I decided to give myself the chance to see if it was actually something that I wanted to do. I just started learning. I did that for a few months.

There was also all this personal stuff going on and it ended up just being extremely depressing and I was not in an emotional state to actually handle everything that comes with starting how to program. Especially because I started actually learning backend development. Just having the computer yell at you and trying to find resources online to just get you to the next step was really difficult, especially with the languages I was choosing, I think. I started with Ruby on Rails, the resources at the time, everybody has a different way to solve a problem and I wasn't experienced enough to tell the difference between a good solution and one that was going to get me to the next level but actually break everything else. That process was extremely difficult.

Because I had lost my job and I was living back at home and I had all this personal stuff with the guy that I was with at the moment, it was just a lot to handle. I quit basically. I stopped, I just couldn't handle it anymore. I ended up looking for a job. I ended up getting a similar role as I had before in London, with a co-working space in New York. I did that for a year and then after a year I was like, "I'm better now and I can't keep doing this to myself." I quit my job and got an internship as a frontend developer.

Laurence:
Sit tight podcast listeners. We're taking a quick break to hear a word from our sponsors.

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Wow, so okay. You got another job. It was doing something similar to what you were doing in London. You were there for a year and then you were like, "Alright, I need to go back, I want to try to pursue web development." And then you quit that job and managed to get an internship. I still think that the fact you were able to get an internship pretty quickly, that seems impressive. Especially without any formal web development experience. How did you go about that?

Luisa:
I was very fortunate. If there's anyone out there who's wondering how you can internship without experience, basically what happened was I put myself in a really good position. Working at a co-working space and managing the co-working space specifically was fantastic and I learned this through my experience in London as well. Basically what you're doing is you're building your network and you're meeting people who are doing a lot of different things.

The way I got my internship was that I actually posted to everyone in the space that I was leaving because I wanted to pursue programming full time and if anybody had any feedback or anything that they thought might help me, to please reach out. Since I was the community manager, everyone knew who I was was, and I had spoken to pretty much everyone in the space. Will, who's actually the founder of Stealthwerk, reached out to me and he said, "Hey Luisa, if you're interested in learning what it's like to work on a team, just come in and sit with us a couple days a week and we can try to do some of the pair programming stuff." I said thanks and then I thought about it and I said, "Well, how about if I just intern." And he agreed.

I actually interned for a month and it was basically just to see how much I could do. I interned for a month and it went well and he said, "Okay, the next step from here I guess would be to figure out how you fit into the team. You're not experienced enough to give you a job so maybe you can do an apprenticeship," which is basically something that would pay me a small amount and I would get harder projects to work on. So I agreed. That was in July. In August I took that time off to kind of learn some more programming stuff while he figured out where to fit me onto the team and what projects to put me on and then I started my apprenticeship in September. From there it was about roughly six months after I started the apprenticeship where I started working with them full time.

Laurence:
Okay, is this where you're working today as a frontend developer, Stealthwerk?

Luisa:
Yes.

Laurence:
Okay, just wanted to clarify that. So you started, this was last year, September last year, 2015?

Luisa:
Yes.

Laurence:
Okay, yeah, that makes sense. I'm also looking at your LinkedIn. How I know all this, I'm looking at your LinkedIn right now. Okay, one year, five months, alright that must have been last year. Okay, awesome. I love that advice, I love how you got your first job in web development through connections and people you know. That's what I think every guest I've had on the show mentions. The importance of building your network, the importance of putting yourself out there in one way or another, going to meetups or maybe even getting involved in different open source projects online, so yeah, that's great. I think all the listeners should definitely keep that in mind, how important it is to make those connections. As you said, you met them originally from the co-working space you worked at, right?

Luisa:
Yeah.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's awesome. What has it been like to work as a frontend developer? I'm also curious, what do you program in now? I know you said when you started learning you were doing Ruby on Rails. Are you still doing that today?

Luisa:
Yeah, so now most of my job is basically, it's all frontend focus. It's a lot of markups, HTML. We use Sass which compiles down to CSS. We use JavaScript and then occasionally a template language like Handlebars. We don't really use any frameworks because a lot of the projects we work on are for larger organizations and they tend to have old codebases and so usually our code gets integrated into whatever they've done in the past. So we tend to write, the most that we'll go is actually jQuery, but we don't use Angular or React, also because they do tend to act like bloat or heaviness to a website. And a lot of the websites we work on are also image and content heavy. We try to steer away from using that.

Laurence:
Yeah, wow, that's so interesting. As you're talking I'm looking through some of your stuff. Could you name some of the clients that you've worked on?

Luisa:
Yeah, so I've worked on a project for Origins, which is like makeup and beauty products. The brand foundation Smashbox, which is also in the makeup sector. A subset of the Tommy Hilfiger website, which is called Tommy Mag. Then Forbes Media, what else. The project that I'm working on now is for Lenovo. The tablet.

Laurence:
Oh, yeah cool.

Luisa:
So those are the types of projects. They're pretty fun. We use a lot of Gulp and Grunt and all the shiny things that you hear about. It's fun. I definitely learned the bulk of my, I'll rephrase that. The bulk of my knowledge has definitely come from the time I've spent interning and doing the apprenticeship. Now it's mainly repetitive tasks. But the bulk of it definitely came from that initial experience, especially because I feel like when you're learning to program, you don't really have a direction. Which is also one of the perks of being in school or doing a boot camp. When you're learning on your own, you've got a lot of noise and it's extremely difficult to figure out what the best path is for you and to actually take the time to internalize and to look within to figure out how you learn best. When it comes to programming, I think at the end of the day you just have to build things and you need to have a strong emotional and mental mindset because it's so taxing. But it's also fun.

Laurence:
Yes. And I think so many people, and I can relate to what you were saying, it's hard when you're on your own, knowing which path to follow. There's lots of noise and a lot of distractions and there's always these shiny, new things to learn. I know my whole first year, maybe even year and a half of learning, I jumped from one thing to the next and I never really learned one thing well, you know? That's so easy to do when you're starting out. University or boot camps definitely give you a framework to follow, more so than you have on your own. That's really great that you found that, through the internship, that you were able to have a more focused approach. I have to ask because I know, where you work is a frontend agency, right?

Luisa:
We do, I guess you'd say full project builds. I guess what we're known for is our frontend development. We're pretty much very design minded and we also build mobile first.

Laurence:
I'm just curious, looking ahead, are you looking to stay in the frontend world or are you maybe thinking of branching into other areas of web development like backend or iOS development or whatever?

Luisa:
I'm actually learning Python at the moment, which is insane because I'm taking this class on Coursera which is called Learn to Program - The Fundamentals. There's two levels. It's taught by the University of Toronto and it's Python focused. The insane thing is that I signed up for the class three years ago and then a few weeks ago I signed up for the class again and it ended up being the same exact date, just three years apart. I thought that was insane.

Laurence:
Yeah, that's so crazy. So you're learning Python, just because or is there something you want to explore more with it?

Luisa:
I'm learning Python, ideally I do want to do Full Stack development or maybe move to backend. I just think the problems that you solve are a bit more in line with the types of things I'm interested in. I'm learning Python because it's kind of, I haven't really found a good resource when it comes to learning Node, which is what I want to use on the backend. I'm learning Python because it's a good language and a lot of companies use it. I also feel like it's tactically pretty similar to JavaScript. So it's not that far apart. So I'm learning Python, but I do want to do more Full Stack development with a focus on JavaScript on the frontend and the backend as well.

Laurence:
Okay, so you learn Python, maybe some JavaScript, Full Stack JavaScript, Node, but yeah, starting with Python. I was actually thinking in my head when you mentioned it because I know a lot of data jobs or data science type of things will use Python. So I was wondering if maybe, with your Economics background, to do some statistics and things like that?

Luisa:
Maybe, who knows?

Laurence:
Time will tell. Hey, it's good to have that Python certificate on your LinkedIn from Coursera, if you ever do decide to change directions.

Luisa:
Yeah, definitely.

Laurence:
So before we hit the record button, you mentioned that, or maybe this was even in your intro, you mentioned that you're only working with four other people right now. Is that just on the dev team or is that the entire company?

Luisa:
That's the entire company.

Laurence:
So what's that like, working at a small dev agency? I know a lot of listeners are thinking that that's maybe a direction they want to take, so instead of working at a big tech company doing more of a digital or dev agency kind of role.

Luisa:
Yeah, so there is a big difference between working at an agency, I think regardless of it's size, and working at a startup. Also the interviewing process is quite different. When you're interviewing for an agency, a lot of it has to do with past projects, but also they want you to be design minded and they know, I think they're a bit easier on you if you are a junior developer, just because they tend to have more people on the team. They assume you'll be able to pick up things quicker.

Whereas with a startup, I feel like, depending on the size of the company, they might not have as many resources or they might not have the time to train you and so unless you're already more advanced or you can prove that you learn extremely quickly, the chances of you landing at a startup are a bit more difficult. Also startups, a huge emphasis I feel is algorithms. Whereas an agency doesn't, because day to day you're not using that as much in your work. There's definitely a difference when it comes to the interview process.

Day to day, working with a team of four, we're basically remote, so not everybody comes into the office, that's pretty unique to our team. Our projects have to be pretty short, so we'll have a week where we're working kind of late hours or we might have to work on the weekend to having a week where there isn't much work and you're just looking over past projects or going through briefs for a new projects. It fluctuates quite a lot. Also a lot of the projects that we work on are short time builds. Basically they'll be anywhere from, it could even be as short as three to four weeks. Then as long as four months.

Once we pass a code along it's unlikely that we see it again. So we have to pay a lot of attention to any documentation we write, how we comment our code, how we structure it, how we name our files, how we name our classes, because we won't be around to explain that to whoever picks up the code after us. Whereas with a startup, chances are that someone who wrote the code that we're working on will be around, and if something's unclear we'll be able to ask them. It's a really different experience in terms of how you write your code and how you document your code and also how you interact with code that you're looking at for the first time. I've had projects where there was no way that I could contact the person who had worked on the code before and so it almost forces you to be more mindful of how you write your code and then also, you're almost like a detective trying to figure out what the person was trying to do who worked on that code before you did.

Laurence:
That's so funny. Thank you so much for sharing all that information. That was such a good explanation. Those are things I never considered. I worked as a contractor before for some dev agencies awhile back, but never something so involved, it was super part time. I love some of that advice you gave, like with the documentation, especially because you're doing it for other people and clients and other folks maybe looking at the code in the future. That's really important. That's so interesting. Thank you so much Luisa for coming on. You shared so much awesome advice, I love it. We're running out of time now, but finally, I just want to ask you for our listeners, where can people find you online?

Luisa:
I think the best place to find me is probably Twitter. I’m @luisamariethm. So if you just leave me a message I'm happy to answer any questions. Honestly, if anybody ever feels like they're stuck or they have any questions about where to get started and resources, I'm super happy to answer. And also at my email, if you reach out to me on Twitter, just because I know it can be really difficult and just overall advice, just know that you're not alone in what you're feeling or you're experiencing. I think learning to code is a lot more than just picking up the skill, it's also a challenge in terms of resilience, so reach out. I'm happy to help out and even just listen.

Laurence:
Yeah, you're such a sweetheart. Thank you so much for coming on. We'll definitely link up your Twitter and your website and stuff, I think your website’s really cool because I was on that before too, in the episode Show Notes so everyone can check out your stuff online.

Luisa:
That's good, thank you so much for having me.

Laurence:
I hope you enjoyed our conversation. Again, the Show Notes for this episode, plus a full transcript, can be found at learntocodewith.me/podcast. If you're listening to this episode in the future, simply click the search icon in the upper navigation and type in Luisa's name. It's spelled Luisa. If you loved this episode, please leave a rating and review in the iTunes store or wherever you're tuning in from. Seriously, it means so much to me, and it helps the Learn to Code With Me podcast reach even more people. Thanks so much for tuning in and I'll see you next week.

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