My first real, non-toy app was an Android card game. I knew the basics of Java going into it, but nothing else. Following tutorials got me to where I had an app

My first real, non-toy app was an Android card game. I knew the basics of Java going into it, but nothing else. Following tutorials got me to where I had an app that I could install and run on my device. At that point, it was up to me to figure out what to do. I started with a single screen that showed some text and added a few more screens that had the same text. Then I added a button that triggered a change of that text. Then a button that displayed an image. And so on until I had a real card game that could even identify whether there were any legal moves available and if the player was stuck. Every step along the way was not easy and I got derailed a couple times, nearly giving up. The hardest single feature to implement was dragging and dropping a card. It took a lot of cribbed code from a few useful blog posts, but the feeling when I actually got it working was indescribable. It was a Saturday morning and I was running around my house, dragging and dropping cards on my tablet like I was 8 years old and it was the greatest Christmas gift ever. That was the moment when I realized I could actually finish this if I was willing to put in the effort. The rest of that weekend was spent in blissful coding and my commitment to becoming a developer has never wavered since. Now in my job, which I got an interview for because of the card game, I have witnessed other people with less self-guided (contrasted with CS class projects) experience than I started out with be unable to persist long enough or self-teach hard enough to solve a problem by themselves without asking for help to get over minor bumps. I won't ask for help from a more senior dev unless I have exhausted my abilities to understand the problem space and can enumerate the things I have tried. I refuse to be the person who simply "doesn't know how". Never ever give up.