One thing is abundantly clear to me: the skills that made people good at building websites are readily transferable and even sought out skills in other fields. Not just the code or the pixels, but the ability to organize, to project manage, to break a big goal down into discrete steps, to collaborate with people with very different expertise, to deeply understand how people experience technology in their lives, to learn and to be constructively critical when the work could be better.

I love Mandy’s take on being part of buiding the early web. Thanks to my brother, who was an early adopter of all things related to building online, I learned HTML and CSS as early as 2006 and began tweaking and building things. Being a web designer in those days was a lot of fun. There was so much to learn; your skills were incredibly valuable, and each day presented a new challenge.

About a decade in, though, something changed. Maybe I was too burnt out, maybe I didn’t know where to grow, but I making websites just wasn’t fun anymore. I’m incredibly grateful to have been able to transition; moving more into product design and building and tinkering with UI/UX related work (namely, building apps). As Mandy called out my skills were able to transfer; and that transfer is what has me hoping I’ll be ready for whatever comes next. 

(Via everything changes)