Let's get this out of the way:
I am not a professional web designer! All I do is push WordPress and its plugins to its limits in order to get what I want.
As with most people, I assume, my first website was a personal travel blog. It was only years later that I took it upon myself to try and build a multi-user platform for a global youth exchange organisation. The idea was that the volunteers could all read and write blogs on the same platform and let me tell you: A lot of troubleshooting and virtual duct-taping went into making this work. But turns out you can actually build a relatively clean-looking social network entirely on WordPress!
Skills-wise,...
…the heavy lifting in both the youth exchange platform and this very website that you are looking at is done by using pre-existent themes, plugins, and website builder extensions. What’s left is the content that you see and read, a bit of layouting, and the occasional CSS command to make something disappear or look different.
Building websites is one of the more fun side-hustles that I can get really sucked into and that introduced me to that feeling you sometimes see programmers express when their rebellious string of code that they have worked on for hours suddenly works and they start dancing around their chair. It tickles my problem-solving and aesthetic fancies in this very peculiar and immediate way.