Howdy!

My name is Asif Kabani and I am a Front End Developer.

I have been a developer for quite some time now, and I wanted to start this blog to help myself, and if the world wide web is willing, to be able to help others.

My Starting Experience

It started around some time, I believe it was the year 1999. I took a class called HTML and CSS in high school. I was instantly addicted at what I could do. Of course this was the era of the dancing gifs all over the web, so my class project page was just that.

I tried taking another course in high school after that introduced computer science. I dropped that class as it seemed difficult for me to understand programming and also the teacher was no help. This was unfortunately the times we were living in.

I was never a studious or a "smart" kid in school. I was always around the "C" averages. Growing up was tough trying to figure out what I wanted to do in life. I went to community college and took some basic academic courses, until I ultimately found The Art Institute of Houston. There I enrolled myself in a program called Interactive Media Design, which was an associates degree plan.

We were taught a plethora of different technologies and classes which included audio, video, graphic design, and web design. The only web design class they taught was basic HTML/CSS and PhotoShop with ImageReady. ImageReady was an extension to PhotoShop which let you slice up your graphics and you could export out a HTML website from it.

The one programming class I did have was called Macromedia Director. This is where I actually got a first taste in some logical programming. The language which it used was called Lingo. I loved what I could do using this programming language and created a cool portfolio piece.

Into the Workplace

Coming out of school, I was working in a mom and pop company called Meyer Instruments, which was a company which sold Leica Microscopes and products. My work involved using Dreamweaver to code and update their website using the GUI mostly along with jQuery snippets for functionalities. I was so relaxed and on auto-drive that I told myself this was the best I could do with what I had learned.

Eventually, I moved on but I gave many years of my life to that company. I moved on to other projects and was mostly always using HTML/CSS and jQuery snippets for functionalities. I did not know what I was actually doing but I knew enough to modify jQuery snippets and make it functional as to how I want it to work.

After this, I got into WordPress for many years. Again, as I was afraid and told myself "I am no programmer," I always opted to the easy way out of programming. WordPress had so many ready to go templates and plugins I just relied on that. It was not until around the year 2013 or so when I finally decided I needed to do more. React was prevalent in the industry and everyone I saw, it required at the least JavaScript and React.

The Want to Learn

I decided to go to a bootcamp to learn some JavaScript and React. I was amazed at how much fun I was having coding using vanilla JS and React. I realized that I just had low to no self-confidence when it came to programming, which stemmed from my bad experience in high school. I wish I had done this much sooner.

Anyways, this was a short introduction about me and my small journey from nothing to a developer. As of this post, I am 39 years old and I will be 40 coming in March 2022. I told myself a long time ago I would write a blog. But I always have been a pessimist so it was hard to not negate what I thought, like I am not good enough. I am finally starting a blog and hope to keep doing this going forward. I would love to even have just one impact on someone.

As I am getting older, I am trying to teach this old dog some new tricks.