Hello World! I'm Sarah. And this is first blog post.

By day I work in digital mental health care, and by night I watch too much Netflix.

As someone who's always loved technology (and been the unofficial millennial tech guru with my family and colleagues), I thought it was finally time to get serious about learning how to code.

For the last 3 years, I've been creating and running virtual education programs for healthcare providers (hosted via Zoom) so they can build knowledge on how to better treat patients living with mental illness.

Digital Health has become HUGE in the last 5 years, and it's made me realize a couple of things:

1) A solid understanding of technology (particularly web development) is crucial to the continued success of these programs. You can't have one without the other.

2) Ironically, some digital health programs don't have any technical staff on their teams despite relying heavily on online tools.

I realized about a year ago that the WordPress website we use to house our program materials needed a serious makeover. Its load times were lagging, the UI/UX was terrible, we had wayyyyy too many pages....you get the idea.

The problem was that no one on our team (including me) had any idea how to fix it. And, we had $0 to hire a 3rd party company or a freelancer.

Cue the lightbulb moment.

"Why don't I just teach myself web development and re-do the website? I like tech and I pick things up quickly. How hard can this be?"

Oh my god, I was so naive back then.

While I was able to move the WordPress site into a cleaner layout that was more user-friendly, it still needs a lot of work. I foolishly didn't realize how much of a learning curve there is to web development.

Just this past weekend (August 16, 2020), I FINALLY finished the Responsive Web Design Certificate from freeCodeCamp, well over a year after I started it.

(I procrastinated because I'm a perfectionist who fears failure. I realize now that failure is one of the best learning mechanisms, and I should do it more often).

I hope to soon create more of my own projects (and a personal website) as I really love web development, but in the meantime I'm enjoying the learning process.

And even though I find blogging absolutely terrifying (#introvert), I'll be posting here each week about my journey into becoming a self-taught web developer.

Feel free to drop me a line on Twitter (@code4sarahtonin) - I'm always happy to chat! :)