Not bad, not bad at all. Very holistic overview of the different strategies to take in new knowledge.

One thing for people who are thinking of getting into this space, is that in the last few years - there has been a lot of influx of talent. This means, that the standards are somewhat higher for getting a junior job than they were say… 4/5 years ago. You should expect to polish whatever you display on your portfolio. Half baked REST APIs with primitive front-ends using some basic Tailwind CSS boilerplate with dark mode and some UI cards won’t cut it.

Unless, you make a genuinely interesting project.

My biggest advice would be to focus the bulk of your independent building on what I call a ‘portfolio product’, which has a compelling, genuinely useful use case that gets you excited. When you talk about the project in interviews, you need to get excited about it - it should be a project in a field you genuinely care about, and will light up your face as you talk about it.

If the answer to the question ‘what are you proud of building?’ is… nothing, you might not get a job.