Chen Hui Jing

The self-taught designer and developer from Singapore reveals how basketball got her into web development, how she discovered her love for CSS – especially Grid and Flexbox – and why DevTools have the potential to be much more than a debugging tool

- Oliver Lindberg

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!”