A Four-Year Retrospective

I've wanted to write a blog ever since I started working as a developer. Honestly, I kept putting it off — and whenever I actually sat down to try, I had no idea what to write.

This time I'm committing to it. As my first post, I want to look back on the past four years.

How I Became a Developer#

I studied hotel management abroad. My plan after graduation was to land a job in hospitality overseas, but COVID shut that door. I ended up coming back to Korea, and looking back now, I think I was pretty lost for a while.

Then in the spring of 2021, I took my first coding course — a government-subsidized program that was hugely popular at the time. I figured I'd try it lightly, but it turned out to be a lot more interesting than I expected. As anyone who's been through that kind of program knows, though, it left me wanting more. So I went looking for a bootcamp and in June of that year I enrolled at Vanilla Coding, a frontend developer training program. I spent about six months there.

Vanilla Coding doesn't spoon-feed you. Every week brings a new assignment, and you're expected to sit with it, struggle through it, and find the answer yourself — the instructors show you the path, not the destination. Because I was brand new to both coding and development in general, every single week's assignment felt impossibly hard. I'd hit a wall and think there was no way through… but then I'd tell myself: if I can't even do this, I'm hopeless. And I'd keep at it until it clicked. Watching problems unravel one by one like that gave me a tremendous sense of accomplishment. Even if something feels out of reach, starting and refusing to let go will get you there somehow — that experience is still the biggest thing driving me forward today.

After finishing the program, I stayed at Vanilla Coding for another three months as a mentor. I wanted to keep studying, and I thought mentoring would be a good experience as I kicked off a new career. It turned out that the things I'd been fuzzy on became clearer through mentoring than they had in my own study, and more than anything, I genuinely enjoyed it.

After those three months of mentoring, I joined a startup in Yeouido and started my career as a developer.

What I've Built These Past Four Years#

The biggest things I worked on over four years, in brief:

• Admin panel rebuild — rewrote the back-office UI from the ground up in React. Restructured operational domains like permissions, terms of service, and notices into modules, and consolidated shared data table and form patterns.
• Common UI migration — moved shared components like buttons and inputs, used across multiple services, from Vue to React + TypeScript. Set up a component-level testing environment with Storybook and Jest.
• New service development — owned the user-facing side of a new product from start to finish. Modeled each step of the user flow as a state machine to separate screen transitions from validation logic.
• Internal developer tooling — built a VSCode extension that lets teammates preview and test screens inside the editor, to make our newly adopted server-driven UI approach more ergonomic.

Writing it out like this, four years doesn't look like much. I felt busy the whole time, but when I try to pin down the big, memorable things, I end up with just four bullet points.

Is that just me...? I'm curious how other developers would feel looking back like this.

Still, when I count everything else that didn't make the list, I think I filled those four years well enough.

The Age of AI#

The developer ecosystem changed fast and dramatically over these four years. The biggest shift of all is AI. When ChatGPT first appeared, I used it mainly to ask quick questions on the side. Now I'm using AI in almost every moment of work.

I search Google far less than I used to. The habit I once had of keeping up with React release notes has faded. When I don't know something, I ask AI first and then verify the answer. The way I work is completely different from when I first started four years ago.

Writing code from scratch has dropped off sharply; most of what I do now is review the output I receive and loop back to refine it. Honestly, I still feel a bit uneasy about working this way. But looking around, other developers seem to be settling into the same rhythm.

How Do You Survive This?#

Every week there's new AI news. A new model, a new feature... It keeps getting more convenient, and yet it also makes me pause. What is all this...?

I worry a lot. That's just who I am. It's why, when I came back to Korea after graduation, with COVID showing no sign of ending, I scrambled to find a new path forward quickly. That scramble is what led me to become a developer — and I genuinely think I got lucky.

But now… AI… at this pace… could I actually be replaced? Even if it's not full replacement, I get the feeling I'll be squeezed out in some way.

You can see it just from job postings. Even on frontend listings, AI-related items are appearing in the required and preferred qualifications. More and more roles expect something beyond using AI as a tool.

I use AI every single day, but honestly, I only have a vague sense of how it works. I don't really know how it was built or what's happening under the hood. If that's the case, can I really use it well? Can I keep pace with this rate of change? Maybe I need to move beyond just being someone who uses AI, and become someone who actually knows how to work with it — maybe even someone who builds things with it.

What's Next#

So as a frontend developer, where do I go from here? Picking up a new technology, diving deeper into concepts, getting better at coding in the traditional sense — that path doesn't feel right anymore.

Understanding how the AI I use every day is actually built and how it works internally — that feels like the next step forward for a developer who wants to do more than just use AI.

So I've decided to study AI in earnest — not just to keep using it, but to understand how it works from the inside.

I haven't set a firm goal this time, like a career change. I just want to build up the fundamentals before this AI era moves any further out from under me. Where it goes from there — I honestly don't know. I'm going to start and see.

I built this blog to document the process properly. I'll keep posting about it going forward.

I have no idea where this leads, but they say the first step is half the battle... let's go!