Would you like to share your story here about how has your life been as a self-taught full stack developer?

PS: You may answer it yourself or taking in reference of a friend. Doesn't matter.

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What would you like to know?

@C0D4 You may share about how did you start, how did find your first job, how everything went, basically anything you might want to talk about here.

May be it will help self-taught devs to carve out their paths when they are just starting out.

@C0D4's dev journey:

Let's see, I was a high school dropout,
My first job was working in a restaurant being paid peanuts at best ( they weren't good peanuts ), on the side I was meddling around with website builders like front page and geo cities back in the day, nothing special really just something to do in my off hours.
From there I changed jobs a couple of times before being flat on my ass without a job.

I went and decided to do a TAFE course for IT (never finished so doesn't actually count) but I did manage to pick up a webdev role on the side maintaining a text-based mmorpg (oh those were the days - we're talking PHP4/5 days right here).

That lead me to an E-commerce / sales role which gave me a small step up and a lot of customer facing knowledge.

After several years there I moved and picked up a dev role (contract) for a small UX business that had existing clients.
This taught me a lot about UX, and how to get users to information quickly and how different users view your content, great knowledge to have, although the work hours were beyond a joke. (12+ hours a day sometimes)

From there I picked up my current position (well it was a lot simpler back then) which was an PHP Dev role, nothing too fancy just building Ecommerce websites for a sub-branch of the company. (I maintained 2 websites at this point)

This quickly turned into a sysadmin role on top of that as other devs left the company or moved into other roles, their responsibilities fell under my umbrella.

Eventually over the years I became a solo dev for this place (well solo in regards to the projects I manage) and sit on 6 key websites for this company with a lot of background synchronisations and integrations with other company systems.

Somewhere along the line I was dropped into Salesforce, again another dev left the company and I think I was the closest dev in the building at the time, so I've been doing that + my own role for the past 12-18 months.

Continue below:

Along the way I've had to learn a variety of languages and skill sets I wouldn't have dreamed about all those years ago. But if you keep pushing yourself you can do virtually anything in this field - qualified or not.

@C0D4 Thanks a lot for giving your time and efforts on writing this.

It's great to see you managing most of stuffs for your company but don't you think so you are taking in a lot of work of so many developers leaving randomly which might be making you stressed and burdened all the time?

Are you being paid accordingly?

@techcatchers stress and burden is high, I will agree to that, however i have this tendency to excel in high stress. I'm a sucker for punishment 😐

As for being paid correctly, well I don't get paid to be 3-4 devs if that's what you mean, but I'll take the wealth of knowledge I've had to push through to write my own pay check in the next place.

@C0D4 That's amazing thought man. I hope the same for you.

All the best for the future.

A little bit about myself, I am a self-taught full stack developer from India getting into the corporate world this year. I am 20 right now, dropped out of uni. You may check out my portfolio here: https://techcatchers.github.io/Port...

Made research on the internet, read a fcking lot, and actually coding. I mean trying to do shitty or not projects with what I read.

@Lyniven Didn't get you.