Today's interview is with Rod, a self-taught developer who has made over $60k from a directory of job boards. Read on to learn how Rod became a developer without a CS degree and how he's successfully made his own successful web business.
Hey, so can you introduce yourself?
Hi I’m Rod, started coding at early age of 12 after I stumbled upon a PC with DBase code of the brother of a friend of mine and got hooked immediately. It was like magic for me and from that moment I knew that when I get older I wanted to make a living by typing code. I live in Mallorca, Spain and I’ve been working remotely since 2009/10
How did you learn coding?
I started learning from a book on my own, then I told my father that I wanted to enrol in a bootcamp (back in the 90s). The course lasted a few months and I fell in love badly with coding so my father gave me a PC.
I spent years only sleeping 4 hours because at night I was coding after dinner, locked up in my bedroom. This was before the internet even existed. I was coding in Clipper and learning with a book and by trial and error.
I decided at high school to learn C++ and how to build Windows based apps, complex programs, logics and fundamentals. It was a good learning experience but I was only interested in the coding classes and not in other stuff like very complex math theorems so I quit and started travelling in Europe, worked as a waiter, barman, sales man, fixing restaurant TPV hardware and PCs.
I didn’t know anything about web development but a person asked if I wanted to build a website for them. I did some research and learned about Joomla and built my first website and I charged 400 Euros for it.
I wanted to make something more complex, so I went to an NGO and offered to build their websites for free in return for a link to my email in the footer. They accepted!
I put in a lot of effort and I did a good job. Only a week after I put it online a real estate agency from Barcelona, who were fans of the NGO, reached out. They wanted a website with online bookings and we made a deal. So I needed to learn PHP and jQuery. The website was a success and thanks to it, a lot of freelance work came my way.
How would you advise someone to learn to code in 2025?
I think what works best is learning by building, so in my opinion the best approach is to build projects and get the help of AI when you get stuck, which is a lot easier and faster than it used to be.
Can you make an argument for using PHP and jQuery instead of things like React?
Well, I don’t have an argument, the thing is that with PHP and jQuery I can achieve whatever I want and need, and also make websites run fast, so it doesn’t matter what you use.
