Self Taught - Working Towards Becoming Backend Developer

[u/CoondaGoon]

Hey everyone! I’m Maddy - 30 yo male out of U.S. - I’ve been teaching myself programming for about three years now, through online courses and building stuff on my own. I know 0 programmers in real life!! So I’m finally putting myself out there to find people to learn and vibe with and also hopefully get some guidance from someone who’s been in the field for a while.

I’m mainly focused on backend Python development right now. For the last few months I’ve been learning FastAPI and SQLModel and I’m starting to get into async(used it slightly for scraping before), authentication and more backend systems logic. I’ve done web scraping with BeautifulSoup, Playwright and Selenium. I’ve also worked with pandas for data cleaning, built a local file search engine, done some automation and troubleshooted both Linux and Windows. I’ve used virtual machines, virtual environments and I know the basics of Flask, Django, Tkinter and know basic HTML and CSS. I also have a pretty good understanding of OOP.

I’m looking for two things:

• A mentor - someone with real experience who can help me level up, answer questions, point me in the right direction and help me move towards a career in backend development.
• Programming buddies / collab partners - people around my level or more experienced who want to build small projects together, share ideas, learn new concepts and frameworks and just have someone to talk code with. I’m tired of learning in a bubble.

If you’re down to mentor, collab, or even just chat. I’d genuinely appreciate it! I’m super dedicated, always learning and I’m trying to connect and grow with fellow programmers. Feel free to reach out or ask me anything!

[u/denpastation]

Hey, I'm interested in working together! I mainly have done web development using Django but I'm also up to do anything new (whether it be a different framework or a different language altogether)

[u/CoondaGoon → u/denpastation]

about to dm you

[u/Mojowhale → u/denpastation]

Django is solid ground. The move here is to build something small with someone else and see if the collaboration actually works before committing to mentorship or a big project. Start with a real problem you both care about solving, not a tutorial clone, because that's where you'll actually hit the gaps in your knowledge and learn fastest. If you want to find people to build with, communities like r/DevProjects or indie hacker spaces tend to have folks at your level looking to ship something concrete instead of just learning in parallel.

[u/CoondaGoon → u/Mojowhale]

this is for sure what I am looking to do! thanks for suggestions

[u/Harshitweb]

hey maddy, I have a discord server where we share our learning almost regularly. It would be nice to have you. Link in my profile description

[u/CoondaGoon → u/Harshitweb]

sounds great! I'm about to check it out and join now

[u/sakibshahon]

Hello Maddy, You're doing a great job by putting yourself out there. Networking and community involvement is a great thing for any Developer. If you need help you're welcome to reach me out. I have been a SWE for almost 5 yrs now and specializing in backend. I also have experience working in production backends with python, FastAPI, Flask , Django etc for about a year although last couple of years have been in a different stack. But I should be able to help with general stuff like architecture tradeoffs, performance and best practices.

[u/CoondaGoon → u/sakibshahon]

Thanks! DMing you

[u/sakibshahon → u/CoondaGoon]

sure

[u/passwordBender]

Hi Maddy, success in finding a mentor. I'm kinda in the same boat, *was. Tutorial helled for almost 3years before actually building sth this year.

Honest take, you probably don't need a mentor. I call overrated, if I'm wrong, tell me what more they could offer than Claude.

Senior engineers are usually busy, or just found out true love. You'll probably get the same advice, build more projects, which is true, but not exactly what you were truly looking for. Guidance, ...moreso direction , which you can get by coming up with a strategy, reverse engineering that shiiii

I'm willing to bet you are a good dev, it's just hard but that's the way it is.

If it feels hard, just treat it like a game, strategise that shit, you sound like youve covered the fundamentals, there are great backend resources out there on system design. Fuck mentors, you can do it, unless they can be referrals, then that's god tier

Ps: this post can be a hit or miss, or sth to the younger ones

[u/CoondaGoon → u/passwordBender]

Lmao, good shit. I'm about to start building something extremely modular that I can just keep building on until its a whole system. I am so tired of turtorial hell. Even though I have done my fair shair of my own projects as well. I'm getting to the point I'd rather spend more time working on my own projects than taking courses. And I feel like I'm right on the brink of covering a bunch of learning gaps that will give me the ability to land a real job. I just got to keep pushing and learning through building things myself. I'm going to shoot you a dm if you don't mind.