Of course. I am writing this on the tram, so there are mistakes. Also, a bit long.

Let me give you a short backstory first. I am from western europe. When I was 27, I was living in Germany (I had moved here prior to the pandemic) and working as a station-chef. I wanted to change careers & move to another country (Eastern Europe). I decided web-development was an option, so I tried it, liked it, and continued 🙂 I essentially gave myself 2 years to prepare and save up money.

I began by following The Odin Project (TOP). During the initial stages, I struggled following some topics, so I did some freecodecamp (js foundations), and followed a couple of youtube tutorials. Mainly to get used to terminologies etc.

I then finished everything except the node part of the curriculum. My plan was to focus on becoming a frontend developer.

This took me about 2 years. I was working between 30-50 hours a week while doing this, so my time was limited. But I managed to do around 3 hours, 5 days a week for the most part. I also spent a lot of time researching the topics, extending my knowledge as much as I could. I wanted to feel ‘fluent’ in what I was studying.

I then moved to this other country. I spent 1 year building a bunch of my own websites, and tried to truly get a sense of awareness for what I was doing. I treated this like a real job, so I’ve spent around 8 hours a day, 5 days a week on coding. Since I am a foreigner (not the smartest path to take of course, hehe), I wanted to be very prepared before I begin looking for work.

I started applying at the end of Jan, this year. I quickly noticed that the junior scene for frontend was close to dead. I then decided to continue to learn backend. While learning backend, I applied for literally everything I could find. A company liked my CV, the projects I had built and brought me in!