This is good advice, and "Go out there and build something" can be extended even to "Go out and be a developer in public." Blogging is way under-rated, so is (n

This is good advice, and "Go out there and build something" can be extended even to "Go out and be a developer in public." Blogging is way under-rated, so is (not mentioned by the article) StackOverflow. I wasn't self-taught but did get a lot of interview offers this way (and job offers and book offers). Around 2010 I started answering questions on StackOverflow for the 'canvas' tag, which began because I had some questions and then realized lots of people had interesting questions of their own and I wanted to help. It got addicting in the way that playing with Lego blocks is addicting as a child. Just this strange urge to do it and to get excited about it, and its quite gratifying to feel useful. Not a lot of people continuously participate, so if you do you stand out. All of a sudden I had a "public" developer persona, and I was getting recruiter emails (some very serious but most typically flippant) or just people emailing me questions personally even though I didn't really have any projects to my name. I wrote just a couple blog posts to help out with common issues, and then Pearson asked me to write a book. Sadly the book-writing crushed all my free time and it was actually the reason I stopped regularly participating on SO. So you don't have to build anything to be taken seriously, you just have to be out practicing your craft in public. Blogging and answering SO questions are a great way to build some kind of presence and there are no barriers to entry.