I'm Stephen. I build web apps for a living and I'm learning cloud and DevOps right now. Nobody in my family did this. I picked it up from free tutorials and a lot of projects that never worked, and I post what I learn while I'm still learning it.
The story
None of this was fast and none of it was given to me. That's the whole reason I think it's worth writing down.
Before
01 / 05
I didn't grow up around tech. Nobody I knew worked in it, so there was no one to ask and no plan to follow. What I had was time and a connection to the internet. I decided that was enough to start with.
Learning
02 / 05
Free tutorials. Broken projects. A lot of nights that ended with nothing working and no idea why. JavaScript first, then React, then everything that comes attached to it. It was slow enough to be embarrassing. I kept going.
Working
03 / 05
Self-taught turned into client work. React, Next.js, TypeScript, Supabase. A car marketplace, a work-experience platform, a site for a food business. Real users, real deadlines, real bugs at midnight. I learned more in six months of that than in the year before it.
The turn
04 / 05
I could build the thing. Deploying it, scaling it, keeping it up when traffic arrived, that part I handed off every single time. Once I noticed I was doing that, it started to bother me. I wanted the whole job.
Now
05 / 05
Azure, pipelines, containers, infrastructure as code. I'm bad at most of it today and better at it than I was last month. I'm posting the whole thing publicly instead of waiting until I look like I know what I'm doing.
Here todayIf you're starting out
I know the feeling of reading a job post and quietly deciding it isn't meant for someone like you. It is. What's between you and those people is time, and nothing else.
“I wasn't the smartest person learning this. I was just still there in month eighteen.”
Waiting until you feel qualified costs you years. You get qualified by doing it badly first.
It's uncomfortable and it works. People help you a lot faster when they can see exactly where you're stuck.
Most people quit somewhere around month four. Staying is the whole trick.
Almost everything I know came from documentation, free videos and projects I broke. No money makes it slower. It doesn't make it impossible.
What I'm on now
I'm early in both of these and I'd rather say so. The work is real and so are the mistakes I post about.
Learning the platform properly instead of clicking around a portal and hoping it holds.
Getting the distance from a commit to production short enough that shipping stops being an event.
Work
All of this came before the cloud work. Paying clients, live users, deadlines I didn't set.
Lead developer
A marketplace for certified pre-owned vehicles. Listings, search and filtering, inventory management and lead capture. I built most of it end to end.
Sole engineer
A UK platform that connects students to work-experience placements. I was the only engineer on it, working next to a product manager at my agency.
Design and build
Brand and portfolio site for a Nigerian food and catering business. Menu, gallery and enquiries, built for the phones nearly all of its traffic came from.
Posts
Short notes on X about whatever I broke or worked out that day. Something longer on LinkedIn every couple of weeks, once it actually makes sense to me.
Sample posts, live feed coming
Spent the morning breaking my own environment on purpose. Naming conventions aren't bureaucracy. They're the only thing standing between you and a graveyard of resources you're scared to delete.
Read on XPush to main, build, test, deploy. It took fourteen failed runs to get there. Posting every error I hit and what actually fixed it.
Read on XOwning the deploy changed how I write the app. Some notes on the gap between building software and running it, and why I went looking for that gap on purpose.
Read on LinkedInYou don't need permission or a bootcamp fee. A free tier account and the patience to be confused for a few weeks will get you further than either. Here's the order I'd learn it in.
Read on XTools
Used these on paid work, under deadline.
Working on these now. Some of them still catch me out.
Contact
Fill this in and it lands in my inbox. If you're learning this too and you're stuck on something, that's the message I most want to get.
