The hardest part of getting your first developer job is the part nobody can hand you: experience. Every posting wants two years of it, every bootcamp grad has roughly the same portfolio of three to-do apps, and the gap between "I finished a course" and "I have shipped something someone relied on" is wider than it looks from the inside. I have been on both ends of this — hiring juniors, and informally mentoring a handful of people through their first real work — and the question I get most often is some version of "what should I actually spend my evenings on?"

There are three honest answers, and they are not interchangeable: a structured internship, contributing to open source, or taking on small freelance gigs. Over the past couple of years I have watched people try all three, in various orders, with very different results. None of them is a cheat code. Each one teaches a different muscle, costs a different thing, and sends a different signal to the person reading your resume.…