Truly great websites can change the world wide web, and the people outside it.
Recently, a Front-End Web Developer trailblazer single-handedly sparked a dog pun epidemic in our Mountain View offices with his first nanodegree project, a puppy-specialized website mockup.
Im-paws-ibly cute, no? But enough about BarkMind, PawLocker, Pawstumes and other amazing puppy-oriented products. Who is the man behind the puns?
Haopei is a self-taught freelance web developer and web entrepreneur hailing from Guyana. When Haopei got his first computer in 2002, he was “amazed at the extended possibilities made available by the internet,” and began teaching himself how websites work.
He “built some embarrassing stuff along the way,” but stuck with it and eventually taught himself to build sites including SpaceSeek Guyana and SkilledGuyanese. Haopei shares, “SkilledGuyanese, a much needed job website here in Guyana, is built on Google App Engine and with Python, which I learned in Steve Huffman’s Web Development course.”
Why teach himself? Haopei describes a classic access challenge: “I decided not to attend the (only) university in my country, since I found that the web components being taught were outdated. It’s challenging for any university to keep up its curriculum with the pace of changing web standards, after all. I decided to continue learning online.”
Haopei knows that despite learning web development on his own, he has gaps in his knowledge. He says, “I think most self-taught web dev people, like myself, learn by sporadically searching the web for tutorials, and along the way, we miss out on some important parts.”
With Udacity, Haopei’s “been able to pick up useful foundational information, regardless of how basic the course or project seems to be” and is “making breakthroughs.” Go Haopei!
Haopei’s dream job is to be part of a team that builds “useful, value-adding, socially-impactful, world-changing things. Incredible things can happen when skilled, passionate people collaborate on a vision.”
We cannot wait to see what you do next in the nanodegree and beyond, Haopei!
