Iza Habjan
Frontend developer
based in Berlin

Growing up I didn’t dream of becoming a coder. No one introduced the craft to me, I didn’t know what it entailed. My computer use extended to writing school essays and playing Dynablaster (aka. Bomberman) and Wolfenstein.

I spent my childhood thinking of becoming a writer, photographer, journalist. So that’s what I set out to do. I studied Comparative Literature and Photography, and decided to pursue journalism.
But I never felt like that was what I was meant to be doing.

It took over 30 years of deleting all the social programming (pun intended) to realise that my analytical and systematic thinking is better suited for a job that “boys” do.

I started “coding” in 2006 at University. I had a blog on Blogger, and started tweaking the HTML and CSS code. Then I met my husband who showed me what real programming looks like. He kept encouraging me to learn, saying I would be perfect for it, and in 2016 I started learning HTML, CSS and JavaScript on Codecademy. For various reasons I quit, but the idea of writing code stayed with me.

It took a world pandemic and a whole 180 mindset shift to finally admit to myself that I want to work as a frontend developer, that this is actually what makes me happy and what I want to dedicate my time to.
My coding story isn’t impressive or long, I’m a late bloomer I suppose, but I know what I want, and I don’t shy away from a challenge.