Yeah so first off - great! It's a super rewarding skill to have and I'm grateful to be a programmer myself. Turning that skill into your profession is going to

Yeah so first off - great! It's a super rewarding skill to have and I'm grateful to be a programmer myself. Turning that skill into your profession is going to be tough. I say this because I've been programming professional for 20 years or so and I'm currently interviewing. The process of getting a coding job has gotten extremely hard and demanding. 5-8 years back it was solely based on the interview; if you knew your stuff and could talk-the-talk, they'd generally take a chance you could walk-the-walk. Now, it's gotten extremely unreasonable. Mostly in the 'code-challenges' being asked. I recently was given an challenge and after they gave me a small overview of it, I asked roughly what the time-box should be to get a feel for what they thought the effort take. The hiring manager said to me 'it shouldn't take more than 8 hours'. I was shocked. I've been given many coding challenges, they generally fall into the 2 hours or less category. 8 hours is a serious time commitment. I ended up passing because if this is what they find reasonable during the interview I can't imagine what kind of demands they'd place on me day-in-day out. That's just one recent example. Before that I was asked to write a simple todo list, and given a time box of 2 days. In that case I chose to do it because I knew I could do something like that in way less than 2 days. I ended up using the full 2 days just sprucing up the UX. I ended up not getting an offer from that company because I bombed the 2 hour group interview which I knew would happen; our family pet had been suddenly ill and in the ICU for 4 days straight and my wife and I had maybe 8 hours of sleep over the previous 5 days. Of course I tried to reschedule but the technical recruiter was adamant this last interview was just a formality, they loved my star-wars themed todo list (Jedi-Do, it's on my github: https://github.com/LowRezSkyline/Jedi_Do https://github.com/LowRezSkyline/Jedi_Do) and an offer was pending. So it's one thing to learn programming and quite another to get through the crazy gate-keeping happening these days and land an actual job. Maybe it's easier for entry level programming positions, I have no idea. Best of luck either way!