Very inspired by your story! I’m an artist myself and I’m just getting into coding. I love how you can use CSS for art too (#dailyCSSimages is truly impressive). I wonder how much of that CSS artistic design you would use in a professional website? The sky is the limit I guess.
Thanks for sharing your story. This will fuel my future coding endeavors. 
What an awesome and amazing journey you have been on thus far! I’m excited for you and what the future holds for you.
I’m currently in the middle of applying for jobs as a junior developer and your story gives me a great deal of hope and inspiration. I relate heavily to the part about JavaScript not “clicking” yet. I know the fundamentals and basics but the when/where to apply that knowledge has escaped me thus far.
I wish you nothing but the best in the future!
Thank you very much for your reply, yes, i am interested in chingu, actually i applied inmediately after seeing your post. i´ll look the list of the remote companies you sendme.
Again, thanks very much for your reply
Thanks for your insights! Actually I’ve checked out all of your pens now, really very nice work! I especially like the tumbling stars onto your profile pic lol, very funny! 
No I’m wondering the following:
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How much work is it to learn basic cvg animation with css as you are doing? I might give it a shot, would be nice to learn some basics kind of fast and then experimenting with some animations. I always like it to get quick results, even if they are simple, that’s motivating me. And actually you can usually do really cool art stuff with little means. I’m pretty much a keep-it-simple person.
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Within your pens, have you drawn or made the basic graphics by yourself? Like the panda bear, the bird or the shot gun?
Because if I’m honest, learning to draw would take ages lol. What I’m currently able to do is taking pictures (or shooting videos). So is it possible to work like that, taking pictures, extracting elements from them or use them as a total and then do some animation with it? Or are there any (free) public libraries with nice art work that you can download and use for animation? Maybe I should specialise in emoji animation lol, that would be simple
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Are you working with sound in your job? Because actually I don’t want to work with sound or music.
Sorry for all of those questions lol. That seems to hook me in a way.
A lot really. In fact when I was working for the agency anytime we had a cool design or something a little more creative I was usually the one to build those websites which was fun. There are a lot of great developers who do all kinds of amazing work with just CSS.
Lynn Fisher https://lynnandtonic.com/
The Keyframers do really cool UI animations with CSS. They both also have awesome codepens if you want to check them out.
https://twitter.com/keyframers
https://codepen.io/davidkpiano/#general
https://codepen.io/shshaw/#general
And honestly if you just put CSS only in the search bar on CodePen you will see all kinds of useful UI built with just HTML and CSS 
I learned most of what I know about SVG and animation from Sarah Drasner. She has a book and a few courses online. She also has a great CodePen profile
https://codepen.io/sdras/#general
She has a lot of talks online too if you google here they will pop up.
I can’t really say how long it takes to learn it. Everyone is different. It took me a little while to understand animating SVG but once I caught on I progressed pretty quickly. For example I started learning to animate them in January and I became good enough to get my current job animating SVG in June.
I do draw most of the SVG’s I make in Affinity Designer. I don’t usually make them up on my own though. I typically find an image on sites like https://dribbble.com/ that I like and then turn them into SVG by “tracing over them” with the pen tool in Affinity. If I use an image I find online I credit the original author in all of my pens.
I haven’t converted images to SVG like you explain in your second question but a quick google search popped up several sites where you can convert images to SVG so that might be an option for you.
If you like emoji animation you should check out Chris Gannon’s animations.
https://codepen.io/chrisgannon/#general
I don’t work with sound. I think we have a game coming up where I might have to time my animations to some sounds a designer chose but other than that I haven’t worked with sound yet.
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Hi @cmgorton,
Thanks for sharing your experience 
How did you find your mentor and could you describe how it is to have one (the workflow/process) ? .
I am asking because I really interested in find a mentor, or someone that can help me to be a better programmer.
Cheers and happy coding 
I think this is a little different for everyone so take my experience with a grain of salt.
I actually found my mentor through a course he was offering. It was called the Advanced Beginner Challenge and since I was one of the first people to sign up he offered weekly mentoring via WhatsApp.
He got up to date with my background information and then we would work together to create achievable goals that I could do each week. They had to be specific. Not " I want to learn JavaScript" It had to be more like “I will work on this specific JavaScipt topic for thirty minutes everyday this week” or " I will find 3 jobs I am interested in applying to and write a resume and cover letter tailored to each" The topics depended on what my goals were at the time.
I have had other “mentors” along the way. Usually they are short term or for specific areas I need help on. Like when I was learning SVG animations, I reached out to Sarah Drasner on Twitter. I never asked her to be a mentor. I would ask her specific questions when I was particularly stuck on something and had exhausted all my other resources.
Being a mentor is time consuming and not something people usually get paid for. If you are lucky enough to find someone willing to mentor you definitely make sure you use their time wisely
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Very cool CodePen. I always wondered where the people who made those “wow!” portfolios came from. I checked out GreenSock, and I can already think of applications for it. Your personal blog is pretty nifty. Given that you were doing Drupal templates, I’m a little surprised you went with Wordpress. Or is it older than your first job?
Thank you for your answer, I had never thought about specific goals vs general ones before.
yes, I will try
Thanks again for your answer, I will make a list of everything I need help with and I will sort it by importance.
Cheers and happy coding
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I set up my WordPress site before I started working with Drupal. I set it up when I was first looking for a job. I’d actually like to go back some time this year and redesign my site, learn Gatsby or Hugo and port my site over to one of thsoe instead of WordPress.
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Great Read! Thank you for sharing your experiences and your honesty.
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Awesome! I love reading stores like yours, seeing everyone’s reactions, and the OP sticking around to respond. I’ve bookmarked most of what you’ve mentioned to check out later.
You mention that you learned mostly from Sarah Drasner so I’m curious what courses you started with from her? Do you have any other favorite free resources/specific courses for learning?
I signed up for Frontend Masters just to take her Advanced SVG course. ( recently saw it’s also available on Lynda.com) She recently updated the course and it will be released on Frontend Masters soon. I also bought her book and was fortunate enough to attend on of her workshops because my previous employer paid for us to go to one conference a year and I chose one where she was going to be presenting.
Petr has a lot of free resources on Youtube and elsewhere for GreenSock if that is what you are interested in.
Val Head and Rachael Nabors are great resources for CSS animations and I have taken courses by both of them.
https://www.lynda.com/CSS-tutorials/Welcome/439683/461516-4.html
And one of my favorite things to do is find animations I really like on CodePen or Dribbble and try to recreate them so I can understand the code behind them.
Very Inspiring story cmgorton.
Can I ask you a question if there is no problem?
What are the Job boards or Platform where Junior/ Entry level Remote Developer Jobs are available like you find one and grow yourself there (From where you get that job opening or where do you find now)?
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This is awesome.Thanks for sharing your story.
So I recently got into the world of coding and i have been all of the place from python to html to java and not really focused on any.Just decided to settle on the responsive web design on FreeCodeCamp…any advice on where I can get a mentor and things I should improve on to get a remote developer job?Thanks.
I’m quite new around here… How do I start?
Thank you for sharing. Motivation over 9000!
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I found my first job on the CodePen Job board. It wasn’t actually a junior position but I applied anyway. The second job I foudn was on the Animation at Work slack group. They have a jobs channel that occasionally has some really cool jobs posted. Other than that I usually look at job boards on weworkremotely, powertofly, techladies, and a couple other job boards. None are specifically for Junior/entry level jobs. I usually look at the description of the job and if I meet at least 40% of the requirements I apply anyway.
Hope that helps.
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That’s a very general question 
I might be able to answer better if you had specific goals in mind or let me know what you are trying to do. Are you learning code just to learn? Are you wanting to be a web developer? What are you trying to achieve?