Thinking back, I really could have seen it coming.

My first adventures with code began way back in 2007 when I joined a small team of enthusiastic translators who kick-started the official Polish translation of Neil Gaiman's journal. I became the administrator for the site and, frustated with the limitations of our generic Blogspot template, I started to dabble in the source code, making my first baby steps in HTML and CSS. Before I knew it, I was creating a little spin-off website with short stories, essays, interviews and other "cool stuff and things" as they were generally referred to.

And then one day I decided to delete an e-mail account I no longer needed.

Now, that was a mistake. A BIG mistake. I didn't even think twice when the system asked me if I wanted to delete all related data. One thing I forgot about was that my little website was registered using that old, spam-filled account. And just like that, everything was gone. The result of hours upon hours of translating, of writing the code, resizing fickle images - wiped out with no trace. Backup, you ask? Yeah, there was none. That's how I learned one of the big lessons of adult life:

Always back up your work.

At least I learned it early, when I was 16 years old, never to repeat the same mistake again.

This experience did, however, put me off coding for a while. Then university, work and life in general got in the way. Fast forward to early 2017 when during a publishing conference I spoke to two lovely freelance typesetters of e-books, who told me they learned everything they needed for the job from free coding tutorials. I finished my first Codecademy course on the same day; and after that, I was hooked. Since then, I've been trying to spend at least an hour every day coding, joined the newly launched branch of Codebar in Edinburgh, and recently enrolled in a Web Applications Development course at CodeClan. The best thing is that the more I learn, the more I want to know - it's quite addictive really!

I've now decided to set up this website to act as my portfolio, give me a real-life project to work on, and allow me to share my experiences with everyone who strays into this corner of the Web. Hope you find here a thing or two that will be of interest to you, and if so - please do get in touch via Twitter or e-mail!

Tags: welcome beginnings