Self-Taught Software and Platforms

Independent Learner Ongoing, since 2018
Contents

Most of what’s below, I taught myself. Not in a classroom, and not because a syllabus told me to, but because a specific job or project needed it and there was no one else to hand it to. It started years before any formal marketing education, and it hasn’t stopped: the newest two tools on this list are the ones I used to build the very site you’re reading this on.

Design and Production Software

Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, and Premiere Pro, alongside CorelDRAW Graphics Suite and Corel VideoStudio, came first, out of necessity during my Public Relations & Protocol role at Universitas Muhammadiyah Banjarmasin, when institutional social media and event materials needed producing on a weekly basis and there was no dedicated designer to hand it to. OBS Studio joined the list in 2020, for the livestream events that kept the university running through the pandemic. Canva and CapCut came later, faster tools for the same underlying job once they existed. Microsoft Office is the one everyone picks up somewhere; I’m including it because it’s still in daily use.

Marketing and Web Platforms

Meta (for the targeted ad campaigns run during student recruitment work ), Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, Google Trends, WordPress and WooCommerce, Blogger, Google Sites, and Cloudflare, the platforms most of the actual digital marketing and web work runs on or through. The self-taught use of Google Analytics is also what eventually led me to formalize it properly, through Google’s own Skillshop credential , years after I’d already been reading the reports.

Not Just One Job

None of this is tied to a single employer or role. Most of the design software came from the workload at one job; the marketing platforms came from a mix of that job, the Master’s, and plain curiosity; and the newest additions on this list aren’t tied to any job at all. If there’s a pattern across all of it, it’s less “acquired this skill for this role” and more a standing habit: pick up whatever tool the problem in front of me actually needs, and figure it out.

What’s Newest

This site itself, the one you’re reading this page on, runs on Hugo, a static site generator I taught myself from scratch for this project. And it was built with Claude Code, the same AI pair-programming tool behind MIG Hub , which I used to write, structure, and maintain the whole thing, including this page.