| Hey, I come from a similar background. > i'm mentally and physically exhausted after work. Most people would say "then get a different job", and I think they're not wrong, but I also think you can cheat. I don't know shit about being a bike messenger, but maybe you can grab an hour or two a day to build a sample website or a mobile app. Pretty much everything I learned I learned while I was supposed to be doing something else. Also practice interviewing and coding interview tests. If you're good at those you'll get a job in a couple months, if you're bad it might take years. > i feel like a simple CRUD app is too easy of a project to show my skill to an employer, so i try to work on things like a compiler and a real-time rendering engine, but these are huge projects, and i don't have enough free time to finish them in any reasonable time frame. Don't make the mistake of thinking that you're on one side of the wall and you need to prove yourself, and that on the other side of the wall are a lot of people doing serious software engineering. The majority of people I've worked with are self taught -- as in they don't have a CS degree and figured it out on their own in one way or another. Exactly zero of them have written compilers or rendering engines, and I'd be surprised if they would even know where to start. This is not to say they're shitty software engineers at all; I've worked with some terrifyingly smart people. But we're all just making it up. That's the most important advice I can give to you, and it took me a long time to learn it. You're already good enough; put in the time, cheat and lie or whatever if you have to, and get what's yours. |