https://pt.sarahgebauer.com/videos/watch/f37154d5-a6d0-41d7-bf90-a424f8e7ab94 Hello there! For those who see me for the first time, my name is Sarah. So this summer I'm running a bit of an experiment or series of them. What if I crossed over to the design side of the things. I've been a frontend leaning developer professionally for about a decade. Sometimes I had to cross over to the backend, other times alone or with a designer or a product person we hammered out what needed to be created together. And also before going into development I've played with the design but I've never felt that my design skills are good enough. So in this video I'll talk about my path and what is changing Why I went to frontendLet's not kid myself, I've been coding web sites since before my teens, started doing heavy coding during my teenage years in high school and didn't stop at university. The only thing that stopped me from getting my master's degree in Computer Science was the need to pass a class on parallel algorithms. Four dimensional sphere is something I can see, what's the time spent on summing numbers on a six dimensional hypercube is too much for me. Nevertheless web development has always captured my attention. Especially CSS because that's the most fun part of web development for me. Especially when the development was quite dynamic and every release of a browser meant new properties to try. Those were the awesome days of experiments. Also we had the guidance on how to handle older browsers like graceful degradation and progressive enhancement. So things were fun. Another thing which brought me to web was accessibility. That long word which makes me as a Dyslexic twitch my eyes as I have issues with how many cs and ss are there, is another big reason for me that got me into web development. On bad days I do use screen reader, so having a bit more accessible web and improving my small corner, made a lot of sense back then. Why I stayedBack in mid-2010s the framework wars weren't settled. It was entirely possible that React would be dethroned in couple of years. So I was hoping for that. In the hindsight I was wrong. In the meantime I've developed a niche of sorts, not-React frontend developer. I've worked mostly on Vue, lit.js and Angular projects. Quite frankly some of them were fun, others not so much. But that's the job. If I wanted fun all the time, I'd go visit an amusement park. Why I am looking elsewherePast couple of years the job market for developers went a bit too downhill. First is the downfall of United States of America. I'm not saying this lightly, there are things which are happening in that country that make me nervous. The fact that I got Trump pay cut last year because USD lost around 20% of its value in less than six months and haven't recovered is just a symptom. With the layoffs and currency devaluations, the job market in central Europe got tougher. Both in terms of open positions and wages. Second thing is the proliferation of Tailwind. To be clear Tailwind is a subset of CSS used through utility classes made for people who don't want to bother learning CSS. That's typically backend developers. It also takes away the fun part for me of frontend development. And the elephant in the room, LLMs. I don't see LLMs as a threat that would take away my job. What worries me more is that it'll make my job unbearable and I'd rather retrain to be an accountant. Have you tried vibe coding your tax forms? Tax people on the government side will be happy when people start doing that. As it has been announced recently VCs are buying accounting companies so they can push AI into them. It'll be fun to watch this from the side lines. Not even Joker messes with the IRS. Being part of a statisticThis brings me to the sad part of this video. If I leave this year software development, I'll probably be counted into the statistic of women who have left within their first decade in tech. I'm not sure how to process that yet. ConclusionMy intention is not to make this video a sad. Sure, things are tough right now. At the same time running design career experiments during this summer is exciting. When I was toying with jumping over to design career in the past, I had no idea how to get better. I had no idea what could be my career besides being stuck at one position or going freelance. Since then I've worked with awesome designers, my skills got better. Trust me, I am sure about this. In the past when I was creating designs for myself, I was angry at myself when I tried to implement them. When I made some designs for me in the Fall of the last year and earlier this year, I was no longer angry when it was the coding time. So quite frankly these design experiments make a lot of sense. That's all for today And I'll see you next time Bye Sat, 22 Aug 2026 05:34:21 GMT https://validator.w3.org/feed/docs/rss2.html PeerTube - https://pt.sarahgebauer.com https://pt.sarahgebauer.com/client/assets/images/icons/icon-1500x1500.png https://pt.sarahgebauer.com/videos/watch/f37154d5-a6d0-41d7-bf90-a424f8e7ab94 All rights reserved, unless otherwise specified in the terms specified at https://pt.sarahgebauer.com/about and potential licenses granted by each content's rightholder.