Eleven years of code, seven of design

I started writing code at twelve. Game dev first, because that is what twelve-year-olds want to make. Then Discord bots, then Telegram bots, then desktop clients, then web apps, and now mobile. Eleven years, give or take, with the shape of the work moving every couple of years.

Design showed up later. I was sixteen when I started taking it seriously, which means I have been designing for about seven years and coding for eleven. The order matters. By the time I cared about type, color, and layout, I already had years of muscle memory for how software actually gets built, and design slid in next to that instead of replacing it.

The reason I think this is worth writing down is that the two skills have very different decay rates. Code skill rots fast — the framework I was excited about at fourteen is gone, the bots I wrote at fifteen run on APIs that no longer exist. Design skill compounds slowly. The hierarchy decisions I was making at seventeen still hold up. The instinct for what is loud and what is quiet on a page does not need to be re-learned every two years.

So I keep both halves running. The code half stays sharp because the work demands it. The design half stays sharp because, once you have it, it is cheap to keep — and it makes everything the code half produces look like it was made on purpose.