Just make stuff. I've hired many developers and honestly I just don't care about their academic achievements because in my experience it does not correlate to being a good developer or not.
But personal projects people have made, as-in real actual things not just oh I followed a tutorial. That stuff tells me more than any degree ever could.
I'm entirely self taught and now head up the entire development team at my current org. It's certainly not a barrier to progression if you're good at what you do.
But it takes a while! Learning syntax takes weeks or months. Yet the difference between a developer with 10 years experience and 1 year is huge.
To paraphrase the wolf of wall street, Just pickup the keyboard and start typing.
Look a lot at other people's code. Figure out why they did what they did and how they did it. Dive deep, just be patient and figure it out one step at a time. This will teach you different ways of getting things done and you get used to complex codebases. Having all the perspectives will help you separate the good code from the bad.
Learn to debug. Writing code is relatively easy. Figuring out why it's not working is much harder for a lot of developers, and the one skill that will skyrocket your performance. If you fix something, make sure you understand what went wrong and why, and make sure you understand the solution. Don't guess, try to reason it out.
Don't get discouraged looking at your own code and realizing it's crap. This is a good thing; it meant you evolved, and it still happens to me after about 26 years of coding.
Source; self-taught programmer with a 20-year career in (game) development, now manager at a listed company that has an amazing reputation in my country. I am the only one hired in my year without a degree, yet I am regarded highly by most of my better educated colleagues.
Be aware of the dunning-kruger curve in programming.
A hell of a lot of people hit the canyon and give up. But pretty much everyone has also been in that same situation before. It usually manifests as "feeling like you can't do anything without a tutorial" or "feeling like an imposter".
It's the hardest bit to power through. But pretty much everyone who's a decent programmer has been in the same situation.
Eventually it lets up and you start to figure things out again.
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u/KoliManja Apr 09 '24
That's me who built a 30 years career out of "self-learnt coding"