I had a very similar intro experience to dev. I started with some friends as a hobby, and my first paid jobs were when I was hired to do a bunch of small tasks

I had a very similar intro experience to dev. I started with some friends as a hobby, and my first paid jobs were when I was hired to do a bunch of small tasks in different projects. Add some animations in this Ember project, fix some bugs in this Wordpress project, add a very specific feature in this Angular project, etc. I probably did a terrible job at that time and I'll always be grateful, but it also taught me A LOT about jumping into a foreign codebase and start working on it almost right away, especially since I was paid hourly and I was super-aware I was paid to fix the problems and not to learn the code. IMHO what this article explains is one of the most valuable bits I retain from that time.