In the summer of 2015, I took a Mobile Development course at General Assembly. I originally took the class with my wife in order to gauge he interest in the field as a direction for her own studies. She realized she wanted to go in a more creative direction while I was enamored by Swift.

I’ve been a designer with a bit of a front end skill set since my first jobs in the industry. I started coding HTML and CSS in Middle School without any thought of doing it professionally. I always wanted to work in comics/cartoons and focused on copying anime poses from magazines instead of digging deeper into development. After attending Savannah College of Art and Design, I ended up enjoying graphic design and more specifically web design. This being 2002, the web design department was sort of an addition onto the graphic design track and not really fleshed out very much. My senior year, they added web development to a major called “Interactive/Game Development” which had a bit of the backend development that I would’ve enjoyed delving into. Unfortunately, because of a mistake my freshman year, I couldn’t take any of the classes in that track. I didn’t realize the “Advanced Computer” class was more my speed. Underestimating myself is a theme in my youth, sadly.

Fast forward back to this summer. At the end of this mobile development class I went back to my job as a designer with a feeling that maybe this wasn’t right. I’d have been getting more and more disillusioned with my current situation and was in dire need of a change. I’ve always been interested in doing more and more development in order to supplement my design skills and this class kind of tipped me over the edge.

So, as of March 11th, 2016, I will be taking the plunge full time into becoming a iOS Developer. I’m considering posting weekly logs of my journey for my own benefit in order to help summarize what I’d learned and also to give other designers a heads up on what they could expect if they follow a similar path.

More to come!

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