I began web development in early elementary school, around second or third grade. Generally, I would build platformer games or even dress-up games. I was pretty passionate about it as well, so I joined Irvington’s Hack Club. And from there, I just was able to get more opportunities such as becoming an officer for  Irvington Computer Science Club, working on Viking Hacks, being part of the Coding Tomorrow Initiative, and much more. 

What I love about web development is its creativity. I’m a very creative person both in coding and art and coding just allows me to visualize my ideas better. It’s similar to writing a story, but when you code websites, you’re actually able to see how it looks and have an impact. For example, in hack club, we were able to build a website for a small business, and it increased sales tremendously. It was touching to see how our coding experience was able to help others flourish. 

Adding on, I’m the executive director of a nonprofit organization called Coding Tomorrow Initiative, and I built the website. I’ve also tinkered around building my own website, but I don’t have one up and running right now. 

I’ve taken a course in web development before, and it took me very long to understand it because, with web development, there’s a back end, front end, HTML, Java, and CSS. Especially as it was my first time, I wanted my website to be perfect and personalized. So I spent way too much time on it and picked out every nitty-gritty detail and every color of a button. Now looking back on it, I should have focused more on getting familiar with how to build a website first and then getting into all the details. Furthermore, debugging a website is a very tedious process. I don’t think many people enjoy reading through bugs, but it’s just something every coder has to know and get good at. But, something that helps a lot with debugging is Chat GPT. 

My approach to maximizing website performance would be to make it more interactive. There were studies done to see how much time a user spends on a web page, and it’s actually surprisingly low. So having fun colors and making things pop out can maximize performance. 

Overall, web dev is something that has been around for a while, so I don’t think there’s going to be a boom in it any time soon compared to AI, but I think it’s a very sustainable field. It’s very important for the internet in general, and I’m preparing myself personally by getting better at web development every single day. No one’s perfect, but there’s also the concept of psychology behind it; thinking about button placement, where to put it, or what truly optimizes the performance. So knowing more about the psychology behind users is very helpful to maximizing website performance.