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Interview
Just over ten years ago, before Chen
Hui Jing was a web developer and
internationally sought after conference
speaker, she was playing basketball full
time in the Malaysian national team. As
is so often the case when you’re pretty
good with computers, she became the
go-to IT person to sort out the Wi-Fi
connection or help people log into their
laptops. Her coach then made the
assumption that she probably could figure
out how to build a website as well and
asked her to update the site for the
Malaysia Basketball Association.
“At the time I was young and naive
enough to think ‘oh yeah, sure, why not?
It can’t be that hard’,” Chen laughs as she
remembers the experience. “That was my
first web development project. I knew
nothing about building websites at all but
I did know how to view source. So my
career started off with the trusty copy and
paste command, let’s put it that way!”Chen – who graduated with a finance,
accounting and management degree from
the University of Nottingham Malaysia
Campus – continued on the basketball
team for another two years before taking
a job as a project manager on a major
banking project in Malaysia. However, as
she didn’t have any prior work experience,
the sheer scale of it made her feel like she
wasn’t qualified enough to make a real
difference. “I kept schedules and
communicated with the team leads, but
I felt like a postman, just transmitting
messages from team to team,” she
remembers. “There is value in this work,
but through my interactions with the
technical leads I realised I was actually
more interested in how the systems
worked. The developers were really kind.
When they could spare a minute, they
would explain things to help me
understand, even though I couldn’t
implement what they told me myself. Soa couple of years later, when I got the
opportunity to get hired as an entry-level
web developer, I took it because I wanted
to build stuff.”
Chen began teaching herself how to
code – reading books, tutorials and blog
posts, listening to podcasts and watching
screencasts – but found that to make the
information really stick, she needed to
use a hands-on approach.
“I retain information best if I build the
actual thing,” she explains. “For example,
if I want to learn how to build a chat
application, I can’t just follow along and
copy and paste whatever the instructor is
doing in a tutorial. I need to figure out
what every line does, and if I can, I try to
rewrite it in my own style or add an extra
bit of functionality. So the concept is the
same but the implementation is different.
That method still works best for me now.”
Chen returned to Singapore, where she
had started her education, to pursue web
development professionally. She focused
on the basics – HTML, CSS and JavaScript- and discovered her love for native web
technologies. CSS quickly became her
favourite. “It was so intuitive and just
made sense! JavaScript just felt that it
took more effort. At the beginning I went
a bit overboard with CSS. There were so
many things I could easily have
implemented with three lines of JavaScript
but I’d go a very convoluted route to get
it to work in pure CSS. In hindsight it was
more trouble than it was worth, but it also
meant that I found out a lot more about
CSS than most people.”
One of the podcasts Chen listened to
regularly was The Web Ahead with Jen
Simmons. It was there that she heard
about CSS Shapes, a property she found
especially intriguing. “Jen talked about
how you let text flow around a shape,
which is something that you never saw
on the web before. Everything was usually
a box, a rectangle. So I dug a bit more into
it, wrote a blog post and dropped Jen a
short email to thank her and let her know
about the article. Now, Jen is a very busy
lady. She didn’t have to dedicate any time
to this random person from half the world
away. But Jen responded and even tweeted
out my article. I think that was the first