Welcome to the "CodeNewbie Community Spotlight" — a series where we interview an individual from our community and highlight all that they've accomplished. We can't wait to celebrate our CodeNewbie community in a new and different way each month!
Name: Jason Leow
Pronouns: He/Him
Location: Singapore, Asia
What got you into coding?
My background is in service design, and I have always been a maker at heart. Technology is fascinating to me, and I used to be envious of how my developer peers could just spin up an app and launch it on the internet within days. After a while, designing products and services no longer cut it. I wanted to actually make stuff. From end to end. I wanted to own the entire creative process.
What's your dream role?
Indie hacker/solo SaaS bootstrapper. Being able to create something I enjoy and others find valuable and are willing to pay for is the ultimate dream. It’s all about freedom - financial, creative, time. It’ll probably take many years to get there, but it's so worthwhile.
What made you decide to join a community as part of your coding journey?
I had a few setbacks in my journey with coding. I would get really enthusiastic, take a course, then fizzle out. This happened a few times, and I could never quite make it stick. It turned around when I joined coding communities as part of my #100daysofcoding challenge. By immersing myself. in dev culture, I got to know the lingo, the ethos… and the memes! It facilitated an identity shift which was the key to make coding stick this time. Like they say, the rest is history.
"By immersing in dev culture, I got to know the lingo, the ethos… and the memes!"
What is something you're particularly proud of?
I am proud of launching my very first SaaS within the same year (2020) of learning to code. I spent 3 months coding Lifelog (https://golifelog.com) in Vue.js / Nuxt.js, and launched a minimum viable product in Dec 2020. This was also the year the pandemic started, so I’m pretty proud that I made all the time at home productive!
Tell us about a struggle you've overcome.
The hardest part about coding is overcoming the fear of coding. The programming language, the syntax, and all the tooling you need to even start coding were foreign and scary for a noob. It’s like being alone in a new country that doesn’t speak your native language with no friends and family. What if I break something? What if I installed software that bricked my laptop? It was only after many months of daily coding and debugging that I finally got comfortable with not knowing, and crossed that poetic threshold of self-confidence.
What is one fun fact about you?
Fun fact: I actually love no-code. Despite now knowing how to code. Looking back, the origin point of my coding journey really started with no-code. Using tools like Wordpress, Webflow, Carrd, Sheet2site, ChatFuel, I made websites, web apps, chat bots. All without really knowing much about coding. But it was through no-code that I started dabbling in HTML, CSS here and there. Through no-code, I caught the maker bug, which ultimately led me to coding. So you can say no-code was the gateway drug to coding for me. To this day, I still try as much as possible to use no-code tools even in my coded products.
To read more about Jasons's coding journey, you can follow him here on CodeNewbie Community and DEV @jasonleowsg.
Top comments (2)
Thanks for the feature, @codenewbiestaff!
Congrats Jason, well deserved!