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: Tyler VanBlargan
Pronouns: He/Him
Location: Pennsylvania, United States
What got you into coding?
I was always interested in computers growing up - I remember as far back as 3rd Grade for a career day presentation that I wanted to be a video game developer. Other than struggling to try and understand a Bash scripting book from my dad at one point, I never really got more into coding until my Sophomore year of college when I swapped my secondary education major for Computer Science and fell in love with the problem solving and debugging process associated with development. Despite focusing heavily on Frontend development now, I didn’t learn any HTML/CSS until my first job out of college in 2016, and JavaScript at my current role 2 years after that!
What's your dream role?
I enjoy my current role where I’m building internal company web apps and doing application support with a dash of report building mixed in. Longterm, I think I would like to work as some variety of frontend developer advocate role where I can spend more time focusing on teaching others and experimenting with use cases for software.
What made you decide to join a community as part of your coding journey?
In my first role I was part of a team of developers and having other developers to bounce ideas off of when I was stuck helped accelerate how quickly I was able to learn concepts and find solutions to the problems we were solving. As the only developer in my current role, I started getting more involved with Twitter and the CodeNewbie community so that I could have a group of developer friends to bounce ideas off of and chit chat with about what’s new in tech (and also having people to commiserate with over the more annoying parts of JavaScript).
"I started getting more involved with Twitter and the CodeNewbie community so that I could have a group of developer friends to bounce ideas off of and chit chat with about what’s new in tech."
What is something you're particularly proud of?
I entered the js13kgames hackathon in 2021 and created a nifty little game in the spirit of the old Lemonade Stand flash game. (Game: Spacebar's Space Bar (terabytetiger.com) | Js13k games: js13kGames - HTML5 and JavaScript Game Development Competition in just 13 kilobytes). It was a great way to create a small project using vanilla JS and helped me appreciate how much easier frameworks make things 😅.
Tell us about a struggle you've overcome.
Sharing things as they are worked on instead of only sharing finished products.
Doing so not only helps with staying motivated and excited about what I’m working on, but also provides learning opportunities for me and others! It can be intimidating to show people something that isn’t finished, but it can be very helpful to get feedback as early in the process as possible. If you have to change something major about a project, it’s way easier to make those changes when there’s only 1 layer of complexity than if there are 5.
What is one fun fact about you?
I got married on Leap Day!
To read more about Tyler's coding journey, you can follow him here on CodeNewbie Community and DEV @terabytetiger.
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