Mistakes Self-taught Developers Make That Slow Down Their Job Search

Hello, I'm Deric – a tech founder and a self-taught developer myself. A few years ago I was exactly where you might be right now: excited about coding but also anxious, wondering if all this effort will ever land me that first developer job.

Fast forward to today – I've mentored hundreds of aspiring developers through my coding bootcamp, and I've seen what works and what doesn't. 

In this blog, I want to share the biggest mistakes that I fell for (and see others fall for) that can derail your journey as a self-taught developer. 

Since 2020 I've been building my own tech businesses. By 2022-2023 I launched and stabilized Sigma School, an online coding school that’s now profitable and running at 70-80% profit margins. 

We’ve helped people from all walks of life learn to code and actually get jobs. I don’t say that to brag, but to show you: I’ve been in the trenches of self-learning and mentoring. 

I even got a bit comfortable last year, coasting on our success – but I realized I'm not ready to chill. I’m hungry to have a bigger impact, to scale up and help even more people break into tech.

So believe me, everything I’ll share comes from real experience (mine and others’) and a genuine desire to see you succeed. 

Alright, let’s get into the mistakes. And by the way, as one of my role models Charlie Munger likes to do, we’ll use a bit of inversion: figure out what not to do, so you can avoid failure by default.

Munger famously said, “All I want to know is where I’m going to die, so I’ll never go there.” We’ll identify those career-killer moves so you can steer clear!

Mistake 1: Believing the Hype – Unrealistic Expectations

When I ask new coders why they’re discouraged, I often hear something like: “I’ve been coding for six months and I still don’t have a job. Did I pick the wrong path?”

Upon a few questions, I usually discover they started with some TikTok or ad promising a 3-month path to a six-figure developer job. Sound familiar?

The first big mistake is starting out with false expectations about the timeline and effort required. I fell for this myself initially. I remember seeing success stories of “I learned to code in 10 weeks and got hired at Google”.

It made me think I was failing when I didn’t replicate that overnight success. But here's the truth: those stories are the rare exceptions, not the rule.

In reality, becoming job-ready as a self-taught developer often takes 12 to 24 months of consistent learning and practice. If you’re doing it part-time while working a job or studying, it could take even longer – and that’s okay.

One of my heroes, investor Naval Ravikant, has a quote that hits hard here: “The enemy of peace of mind is expectations drilled into you by society and other people.”

If everyone around you (or every blog you read) says “It’s easy, you’ll be coding at FAANG in 3 months,” of course you’ll feel crushed when that doesn’t happen. I’m here to reset that expectation: it takes time to master coding.

Think of it like learning a musical instrument or a new language – you wouldn’t expect to be concert-ready in a few weeks. So, if you started this journey assuming it’d be a sprint, give yourself permission to treat it as a marathon.

In practical terms, financially plan for a longer learning period if you can. If you’re going full-time self-taught, try to have savings or income to support you for a year or two. That removes the panic of “I must get a job in 3 months or I’ll run out of money,” which is a huge source of anxiety for many.

Removing that ticking time bomb lets you focus on actually learning instead of constantly worrying if you’re falling behind. Real talk: I know patience is hard. We live in a world of quick dopamine hits and overnight success stories on social media.

But whenever you feel that panic of falling behind, remember why you started. For me, it was seeing the freedom and opportunity that tech could provide – remote work, higher pay, building products that scale.

I even saw an indie hacker making $20k/month solo, which lit a fire in me to learn coding. None of those goals are achieved in mere weeks, but they are achievable with sustained effort.

So don’t let society’s hype timelines undermine your motivation. Set a realistic timeline and you’ll be much happier with your progress.

If someone online is promising you a guaranteed $100K developer job in a few months, do yourself a favor: unfollow or “stop watching that creator.” They’re selling a fantasy, not a roadmap. Focus on your journey, not their marketing.

Mistake 2: Getting Stuck in “Tutorial Hell”

Alright, you’ve adjusted your expectations and committed for the long haul. The next trap to avoid is something we call tutorial hell. This is when you spend all your time following along with coding tutorials and courses, but never actually building anything of your own.

It feels like progress – you’re watching hours of videos, nodding along, maybe completing coding challenges that the course gives you. But then you finish the course, sit down to start a project from scratch, and… your mind goes blank.

You realize you can’t actually apply what you supposedly learned. I’ve been there. Early on, I binged a 50-hour web development course and thought, “Yeah, I’ve got this.”

But when I tried to make a simple website on my own, I didn’t even know where to begin setting up the project. It was a humbling moment that taught me a key lesson: passive learning isn’t enough.

You have to learn by doing. In fact, this principle is something I live by and preach. Remember how I mentioned I run a coding school? Well, our approach is very much influenced by first principles and by builders like Pieter Levels.

Pieter is a well-known self-taught developer-turned-entrepreneur who openly hates over-relying on courses. Why? Because “people learn best by doing and building”. I realized this myself in my journey.

In my personal bio I even wrote, “Ultimately, I found that real education didn’t come from textbooks. The best way to learn was to dive into real-world problems and force myself to solve them.”

That mindset changed everything for me. So how do you escape or avoid tutorial hell? Start building almost immediately. Even if you only know 10% of a language’s basics, you can create something with it. 

After you learn a concept in a tutorial, pause the video and tweak it or apply it in a tiny project. For example, if you just learned how to display a list of items in JavaScript, challenge yourself: can you make a simple to-do list app from scratch using that knowledge?

It won’t be perfect – you’ll get stuck, you’ll Google errors, you’ll revisit the tutorial – but that struggle is where real learning happens. Each time you break out of the tutorial script and do something on your own, you reinforce the knowledge.

It’s like the difference between recognizing vocabulary in a language class versus actually speaking the language in a real conversation. 

Let me share a quick story. I had a mentee who completed a popular Python course. He aced the quizzes, built the exact projects the instructor walked through… he felt ready. Then he tried a simple exercise: “Build a calculator app without looking at any notes.” And he was stuck.

Not because he was “bad at coding,” but because he hadn’t yet practiced recalling and applying the concepts. We worked together to shift his approach. For every hour in a course, I had him spend two hours building something related but different.

It was uncomfortable at first – he had to confront gaps in his understanding – but within weeks his confidence skyrocketed. He went from “I don’t think I’m learning anything” to “Whoa, I just built this thing on my own!”

The takeaway: Don’t just consume, create. As soon as you learn a new concept or snippet of code, use it in a mini-project. It can be as small or silly as you want (more on fun side projects later), but do something that isn’t spoon-fed by a tutorial.

This breaks you out of tutorial hell and into the real world of problem-solving – which is exactly the skill you need to actually land and succeed in a dev job.

Mistake 3: Not Building Real Projects (and Forgetting to Have Fun)

This mistake sounds similar to tutorial hell, but it’s a bit different. Even after you start building things on your own, you might fall into another trap: only building cookie-cutter projects that you think “look good to employers” but don’t truly engage you.

Let’s call this the “portfolio checklist mentality”. It’s when you Google “projects every developer should have” and everyone tells you to build yet another to-do app, a weather app, a basic e-commerce site, etc.

Sure, those projects demonstrate certain skills. But if you’re not genuinely interested in them, you’ll hit a motivation wall. Even worse, you’ll have a portfolio that looks like everyone else’s – nothing that stands out.

One thing I’ve learned from legends like Jason Fried (co-founder of Basecamp) and Andrew Wilkinson is that doing something unique or personal, even if it’s small, can set you apart.

Jason Fried often advises to “scratch your own itch” – build something that you wish existed. For me, that was Sigma School; I was frustrated with traditional education and I built the learning platform I wish I had.

As a beginner developer, you might not build a whole startup (or maybe you will!), but you can still infuse your interests into your projects. Love fitness? Build a simple workout logger or a nutrition tracker. Into gaming? Maybe a score tracker or a mini text-based game.

When you work on projects that excite you, two things happen: you stay motivated (because it’s fun!), and you create a portfolio that tells a story about who you are.

Let me emphasize the motivation part: if you’re only ever coding things that feel like chores (I guess I have to build a blog again because some blog said so), you’re going to burn out or lose interest.

One of the best antidotes to burnout is playfulness. Code something weird or funny. Experiment with a new library that isn’t necessarily “industry standard” but looks cool to you.

This keeps the spark alive. I had days in my learning journey where I absolutely did not feel like coding another CRUD app for practice. So instead, I’d spend a day making a silly random quote generator that spit out motivational quotes from my favorite anime.

Useless? Maybe. But it made me smile and guess what – I learned how to fetch data from an API and display it, which is a real skill I later used on serious projects. Now, here’s a bonus: Those quirky, fun projects can become awesome talking points in interviews if you frame them right.

Suppose you’re interviewing at a healthcare startup and you can show them the calorie tracker app you tinkered with – it demonstrates genuine interest in their domain and proactivity.

Or say you’re meeting a dev team that’s super into open-source, and you can mention how you tried building a little game using an open-source game engine over a weekend. These personal touches make you memorable.

As an employer, I’ve interviewed a lot of junior devs, and believe me, after the tenth weather app, they all blend together.

But the candidate who showed me an app he made to help his family business track inventory – not a school assignment, just something he built out of necessity – that stood out because it was real.

So the mistake is not building real projects that mean something to you. The fix: have fun and follow your curiosity. Don’t worry that every project has to be an enterprise-grade masterpiece.

Early on, it’s more important that you finish projects and learn from them than that they’re perfectly polished. And if you can solve a real problem (even a tiny one for yourself or someone you know), that’s gold. You’ll have a story to tell and a deeper sense of accomplishment.

Mistake 4: Relying on Motivation Instead of Building Discipline

Let’s switch gears to something a bit more psychological. This one is a silent killer of many self-taught dev careers: depending on motivation to carry you through.

Motivation is that initial excitement you feel when you decide “I’m going to learn to code and change my life!” It’s awesome, it’s the spark that gets you started. But motivation is like a sugar rush – it won’t last.

Some days you wake up and you just don’t feel like it. The new-ness has worn off, or you hit a hard bug yesterday and today you’re dreading facing it. This is where a lot of folks start slipping.

They miss one study session, then another, and soon “learning to code” becomes “oh yeah, I should get back to that someday.” The truth is, even the best developers have days where they’d rather do anything but code.

I certainly did (and still do occasionally!). The difference between those who push through and those who quit isn’t that the successful ones always feel motivated – it’s that they’ve built habits and systems to keep going regardless of daily motivation levels.

In other words, they have discipline. Now, I’m not talking military bootcamp discipline (though shoutout to one of my students, a former military guy, who actually tried coding 14 hours a day because he thought he could brute-force it – we had to dial that back).

I’m talking about simple routines and environmental tweaks that make it easier to stick with coding regularly. For example, set aside specific time slots in your week that are “coding time” and treat them like appointments you can’t miss.

Maybe it’s Monday, Wednesday, Friday from 7pm to 9pm, or an hour every morning before work. Put it on your calendar. Let family or roommates know “hey, if you see me with headphones on at this time, I’m in my coding zone.”

I used to be the kind of person who hated rigid schedules – one of my role models, Andrew Wilkinson, even preaches designing business around the lifestyle you want (as in, work should serve life).

I agree with that – one reason I left corporate life was to have more control over my time. But I learned that when it comes to acquiring a tough skill like coding, some structure is actually freeing. It frees you from waiting to “feel like it.”

You just do it because Tuesday at 8pm is the time you programmed yourself to sit and code. Paradoxically, once you start coding in those low-motivation moments, you often find the motivation kicks in after you begin.

Action precedes feeling, not always the other way around. Another tip: track your progress and celebrate small wins. Discipline isn’t just about rigid rules; it’s also about giving yourself feedback and rewards.

Keep a simple journal or log of what you did each session (Today I finally solved that API bug or Followed a tutorial on React hooks and made a small to-do list app with them). When you look back at a week or a month of these notes, you’ll see how far you’ve come.

That can be incredibly motivating in a sustainable way. It’s like seeing your gains at the gym – progress fuels the habit loop. Now, I’d be remiss not to mention personal well-being here.

Coding is a mental activity, and your mind needs support from your body and environment. Basic stuff: get enough sleep, stay hydrated, don’t live on caffeine alone, get some exercise in.

On days when I felt brain-dead, it was often because I slept 4 hours and drank 3 cups of coffee and no water (recipe for disaster). Treat your body kindly so it can give you the energy and focus you need during those coding sessions.

One of my mentors gave me this simple advice when I was struggling: “When you’re tired, learn to rest, not quit.” Sometimes the disciplined thing is actually to take a short break or a brisk walk, then come back refreshed, rather than stare zombified at the screen for 5 hours accomplishing nothing and then feeling guilty.

Finally, remember why you’re building discipline: to reach that goal of becoming a developer. When motivation wanes, habit and routine will carry you through.

And when you do hit a milestone – say you finally build that project or solve that algorithm problem – you’ll feel a pride that no fleeting burst of motivation can match. You’ll know you earned it through consistent effort.

Mistake 5: Going It Alone – Not Seeking Community or Support

The self-taught path can feel lonely. You might imagine it’s you, your laptop, a dark room, and endless Stack Overflow searches. And yes, there will be a lot of solo work. But don’t make the mistake of isolating yourself completely.

Going it alone without any support network is not only demotivating, it also slows your learning. You’ll inevitably get stuck on bugs or concepts that someone else could help you solve in 5 minutes, but if you have no one to ask, you might spin your wheels for days and end up frustrated.

I experienced both sides of this. At first, I was too proud (or shy) to ask for help. I thought, “Real programmers figure it out themselves.” Oh man, wrong mindset. Real programmers ask for help all the time – they just know where to ask and how to collaborate.

Once I started reaching out – joining a few Discord and Slack communities, and later even creating my own with Sigma School – my learning accelerated. Even just having peers to talk to who are on the same journey is huge.

You share tips, you vent about errors, you celebrate each other’s wins. If you don’t have a local network, no worries – there are plenty of online communities for new developers.

FreeCodeCamp, Codecademy forums, Reddit communities like r/learnprogramming, and many coding YouTubers have Discord servers for their audience. Join one or two communities that resonate with you.

But here’s a pro-tip: don’t just join and immediately ask a question without introducing yourself or contributing. The people who get the best help are those who engage sincerely.

Say hi, mention you’re new and what you’re learning, respond to others’ posts when you can (even if it’s just encouragement or a “I was stuck on that last week too, here’s what helped me”).

Build relationships. Then, when you have a question or need advice, folks are much more willing to dive in and help because you’re one of them, not a drive-by asker. Another form of support is more one-on-one: mentorship.

This can be a game changer if you find the right mentor. It could be a senior engineer you met at a local meetup, or someone you connected with on LinkedIn who’s willing to give you guidance.

I know not everyone has access to a personal mentor, so consider this optional but valuable. Even a single 30-minute call with someone experienced, where they review your resume or give you feedback on your project code, can save you weeks of going down the wrong path.

If you can’t find a free mentor, there are paid mentorship or tutor platforms – but do your research and make sure the person has a good track record of helping beginners. One more thing on community: don’t compare yourself harshly with others in the group.

It’s great to be in a community, but sometimes seeing someone post “Just got a job offer after 6 months of learning!” can make you feel inadequate. Remember Mistake #1 – everyone’s timeline is different.

Use others’ successes as inspiration, not a stick to beat yourself with. In a healthy community, those who succeed will often share how they did it, which is useful info.

And when you succeed (and you will!), pay it forward and share your story to help lift someone else up. In short, self-taught doesn’t mean alone. Find your tribe, even if it’s a small one.

Humans are social creatures – having support, accountability, and camaraderie will keep you sane and motivated on this long journey.

Plus, networking in these circles can directly lead to job opportunities – I’ve seen people in our community refer each other to openings or even team up on freelance gigs. You never know where a casual connection might lead.

Mistake 6: Not Measuring Progress or Recognizing Growth

This mistake is subtle but deadly for confidence. Many self-taught developers fail to recognize the progress they’ve made, and because of that, they feel like they’re always spinning their wheels.

When you’re learning on your own, there are no grades, no certificates at each step, no teacher saying “Great job, you moved up a level!” You have to be your own coach in a way.

If you don’t periodically take stock of how far you’ve come, you might wrongly assume you haven’t learned anything – and that misconception can make people quit.

I’ll share a simple exercise that worked wonders for me and that I tell all my students: look at something you coded 1 or 2 months ago.

Compare it to what you can do now. Chances are you’ll cringe a bit at your old code – which is actually fantastic! It means you’ve improved.

Maybe two months ago you didn’t even know how to properly structure an HTML page, and now you’re comfortably building multi-page websites.

Perhaps your first JavaScript functions were clunky and 30 lines long, and now you know how to write cleaner, shorter functions or use array methods that make it more elegant.

Those are signs of real progress. Yet, when you’re in the day-to-day grind, it’s hard to notice these improvements because they happen gradually.

It’s like watching a puppy grow – if you see it every day you don’t realize how big it’s gotten until you look at a photo from a while back.

So keep your old code! Don’t delete your early projects out of embarrassment. Archive them as trophies of how far you’ve come.

I still have the very first website I made – it’s hideous and was basically a bunch of copy-paste from a tutorial with my own content swapped in. I keep it to remind myself that everyone starts somewhere.

Another way to measure progress is to keep track of milestones. Your first website. Your first bug that took you 3 days to fix (and you fixed it!). Your first time contributing to an open-source project or helping someone else debug.

Maybe the first time you built a full-stack app connecting front-end and back-end. Write these down in a learning journal or even a simple text file with dates. On days you feel like “ugh, I’m getting nowhere,” read that list.

You’ll see a path of accomplishments that are easy to forget. Also, get feedback from others periodically. This ties back to community and mentorship.

When a more experienced dev glances at your code and says “Hey, nice approach here, have you considered also learning about X to improve it?” – even that is validation that, yes, you have code worth improving!

It’s a weird way to think about it, but constructive critique is a sign that you’ve moved beyond absolute beginner. Early on, everything you write is probably “wrong” or inefficient.

After some progress, a reviewer will find specific things to nitpick, meaning a lot of the other stuff you did was right. Take that as a win! I remember feeling like I was in a fog where I just “didn’t know what I didn’t know.”

It helped to map out what I had learned and what was next. For example, I’d list: Okay, I know HTML/CSS basics, I built a couple of responsive pages – check. I learned JavaScript basics – check.

I haven’t touched a front-end framework yet – that’s on my list. I also haven’t done any backend – maybe I’ll try Node.js next. Writing it out made the journey tangible and also showed me that hey, I actually covered a lot of ground already.

Each checkmark was a confidence boost. The mistake here is thinking lack of perfection equals lack of progress. Don’t do that to yourself.

You can always find someone better or something you don’t know (this is true your entire career in tech).

But don’t let that blind you to the fact that you are miles ahead of past you. Recognize and celebrate that growth – it will fuel your optimism and persistence.

Mistake 7: Treating the Job Search as an Afterthought

Eventually, the goal is to land that job. Here many self-taught devs stumble because they don’t approach the job search with the same diligence and strategy they applied to learning.

I get it – after a long learning journey, you’re exhausted and just want the reward. But getting a job is a new challenge of its own, and yes, it requires effort and strategy.

One common mistake is having a weak or generic portfolio and resume. By “portfolio” I don’t necessarily mean a super fancy personal website (nice-to-have, but not the core).

I mean the collection of projects and code that represent your skills. Make sure your projects are accessible – host them online if possible, and definitely put your code on GitHub.

I’ve seen hiring managers immediately lose interest in a candidate who only listed project names on a resume with no links. They think, “Hmm, why can’t I see the code or the live demo? Did they really build it? Is it any good?” Don’t leave that doubt.

Even if it’s a simple project, deploy it on a free service (Netlify, GitHub Pages, Heroku, etc.) and link it. Include your GitHub URL on your resume. Speaking of resumes, tailor it a bit for tech.

List your technical skills, but don’t list 50 technologies just to look cool – list things you actually know at least moderately. Highlight projects under your experience section if you don’t have relevant work experience.

For example, instead of trying to pad with unrelated jobs, you could create an entry like “Freelance Web Developer – 2023” and bullet point the projects: “Developed a full-stack MERN application to track personal finances, implementing user authentication and responsive design.”

Even if no one paid you to do it, you did the work, so present it professionally. Now, cover letters – I know, everyone hates them. There’s advice floating around to skip cover letters because “recruiters don’t read them.”

In my experience, a well-written cover letter can make a difference, especially for junior applicants. It’s your chance to convey enthusiasm and fit beyond your bare resume.

Keep it short, but customize it to the company: why do you want that job, and how can you contribute? If the company’s mission resonates with you, say that.

If you have used their product or are passionate about their industry, mention it. Show that you’re not just firing off 100 blind applications (even if you are – nobody likes to feel like one of many).

Let me emphasize: apply broadly and don’t get discouraged by rejection. When I was first job hunting in tech, I sent out nearly 200 applications. Yup, 200.

The vast majority were black holes – no response. Some were polite rejections. A handful led to interviews, and finally one worked out.

That’s normal, especially in a competitive market or if you’re aiming for junior roles where lots of people are trying to get in.

It can feel demoralizing, but remember, you only need one “yes.” All the “no” responses (or non-responses) don’t matter once you have that offer in hand.

To keep yourself sane, turn the job hunt into a systematic process rather than an emotional rollercoaster. For example: decide you’ll send 5 applications every weekday. Track them in a spreadsheet (company, role, date applied, any notes).

This makes it a game or a challenge rather than a nebulous “I’ll send some resumes out and cross my fingers.” It also helps you follow up – yes, following up a week or two later on an application can sometimes bump you in their priority list.

And please, if you get to the interview stage, prepare for it like it’s another skill to learn. Practice common interview questions (both technical and behavioral).

If you haven’t done data structure and algorithm practice and you know the role will have coding challenges, spend some time on LeetCode or HackerRank for a few weeks beforehand.

It’s a bit of a separate track from web development, but many companies expect you to solve a couple algorithmic problems, so don’t be blindsided by that.

The job search can feel like a whole new learning curve – because it is! But approach it with curiosity rather than desperation.

Treat it like a project: you’re building your “career launch” just like you built your apps. And every rejection or interview you don’t ace is feedback to learn from, not a verdict on your worth. Which leads me to the final, perhaps most important mistake to avoid…

Mistake 8: Giving Up Too Soon (AKA Forgetting Perseverance)

You’ve probably sensed a theme through all these points: don’t quit. The only guaranteed way to fail at becoming a developer is to stop trying.

It sounds cliché, but it’s true. I’ve seen so many promising learners give up right before they were about to turn a corner.

It’s like that meme of the guy mining underground who stops one swing away from hitting the diamond vein.

Often, when things feel the most frustrating, you are on the verge of a breakthrough – a surge in understanding or that job offer coming through.

One of my role models, Patrick Grove (a successful entrepreneur), studied tons of entrepreneurs and noted that “the key common trait is perseverance… the innate ability to keep going when the end seems near, to never give up, to keep trying until something finally works.”

That trait is more important than raw intelligence or resources. I firmly believe the same applies to getting into tech. You don’t have to be a genius (I’m certainly not!).

You just have to be relentless and adaptable. Now, I’m not suggesting you bash your head against the wall blindly. If something isn’t working, persevere and adjust.

For example, if you’ve applied to 100 jobs and not gotten any interviews, don’t quit – but do step back and ask, “Is my resume effective? Am I applying to the right kinds of roles? Should I network more instead of just cold applying?”

Get feedback, iterate on your approach, and continue. Perseverance isn’t stubbornly doing the same thing over and over if it’s not yielding results; it’s continually finding ways forward when you hit obstacles.

Let me share a personal low point. After months of coding on my own, I hit a phase where I felt like an impostor. I thought, “Maybe I’m just not cut out for this. I’ll never be as good as those CS grads.”

I nearly shelved the whole idea of a tech career. What saved me was a combination of the earlier points we discussed: I talked to friends/mentors about it (community), I looked back at my old projects (progress was real even if I felt stuck), and I realized my expectations were skewed (I was comparing myself to someone with 4 years of degree training).

I decided to give it “one last push” – and during that period, I built one of my best projects, which later became a cornerstone of my portfolio. A couple months later, I landed a job.

Imagine if I had quit a week before building that project? The narrative would have been “I tried coding for a bit, but it didn’t work out.” And I’d never know how close I was.

So how do you cultivate perseverance? Partly through everything we already talked about: having fun to avoid burnout, being disciplined and consistent, getting support, acknowledging your wins.

It all builds a mindset that can weather the storms. Also, sometimes it’s about managing those outside pressures – maybe family or friends are skeptical, asking “So, when are you actually gonna get a job?”

I know that can weigh on you. Remember that you are driving this bus, not them. You don’t owe anyone an overnight success. Prove it through results when you’re ready – until then, keep your head down and keep coding.

A quick note: the tech industry can be volatile. Maybe you’re learning during a tough economic time when companies are slowing down hiring. That can extend your search or make it feel futile.

But cycles change. If you keep improving yourself, when the tide turns, you’ll be the one ready to grab the opportunity. As Naval Ravikant says in a broader context, “Apply specific knowledge with leverage and eventually you will get what you deserve.”

In our context, your specific knowledge is your coding ability, and leverage is all the tools, community, and strategies you use. Eventually, it will pay off.

To cap this off, I want you to internalize this: you are probably closer to success than you think. Many of the self-taught developers I’ve known who quit, were actually just a few weeks or a couple projects away from being job-ready.

It’s just hard to see that from the inside. So take it from someone who’s seen the pattern over and over – don’t give up on yourself. Be patient, keep learning, keep applying, keep improving. The only way you lose is if you leave the game entirely.

In conclusion, being a self-taught developer is a challenging but incredibly rewarding journey. Yes, it’s longer and twistier than the neatly packaged paths some bootcamps or universities might advertise.

But it also molds you into a resourceful, resilient, and self-reliant problem solver – and that’s pure gold in the tech world.

Avoid these common mistakes: keep your expectations realistic, learn by building, infuse your own interests, build habits for consistency, find your community, track your progress, be strategic in your job hunt, and above all, persevere.

I speak from the heart here: I went from an outsider in tech, teaching myself at odd hours, to running a tech business and helping others get into tech. If I could do it, truly, so can you.

There’s a quote from Brad Jacobs, a businessman I admire: “So much of success comes from keeping your head in a good place... Expect positive outcomes. Stop beating yourself up mentally.”.

Keep your mindset positive. Don’t beat yourself up over mistakes – learn from them. Each bug you fix, each project you finish, each rejection you overcome is making you better.

Stay humble, stay hungry, and keep going. Your future developer self is waiting, and I can’t wait to see what you’ll build and achieve. Good luck, and happy coding! 🙌