
Ask HN: Career building suggestions for a self-taught dev? - deepdesai
Hey! So I&#x27;ve had an interesting couple of years professionally, and I&#x27;ve spent the bulk of my time teaching myself how to code. I recently released my first project – www.jamsontoast.com At first glance it&#x27;s probably super easy to dismiss as &#x27;just a music player&#x27; but if you spend some time with it, you might be able to tell that I put some serious effort into it.<p>I wanted to get some opinions on how I would go about beginning a career with my newly acquired skills. I am really interested on the product side of things, and have an eye for good design. More importantly I am open to (and quick at!) learning new things. I am extremely interested in mixed reality, because there is probably a lot of work to be done there in terms of interaction design. I think MR in particular would be a good fit for me because I think I&#x27;d do quite well at the intersection of design and engineering – I&#x27;m not the person to ask how to shave milliseconds off your DB reads&#x2F;writes.<p>I think a pretty obvious move for me to make would be to get an actual job as a developer. I&#x27;m working on a freelance project at the moment. But I really want to go work at more interesting places – small to growing startups would be ideal, because that&#x27;s a place where I can work on product today, while also contributing to strategy for tomorrow. And I&#x27;m working on trying to make that happen, but so far I&#x27;m mostly getting the silent treatment. I&#x27;m not sure how I&#x27;d go about presenting myself as an employable self-taught dev. I&#x27;d imagine that in India, with its massive supply of CompSci grads, I don&#x27;t really stand out. I&#x27;m more than happy to move elsewhere, but I&#x27;d imagine that just adds an unnecessary layer of complexity. Also my professional network in this industry is somewhere between lacking to non-existent. It probably doesn&#x27;t help that I don&#x27;t use any personal social media accounts.<p>Looking forward to your suggestions!
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deepdesai
My background, in a nutshell: I graduated with a marketing degree from a
school in upstate NY, was working in Manhattan at an ad agency. My US visa
expired, so I moved back to India, where I was doing similar marketing
strategy stuff in Mumbai, both at agencies and in-house at organizations.
Brief detour in the middle where I co-founded a (now defunct) startup which
was trying to build an Expedia-like portal for medical tourism. Now I'm here,
figuring out what's next.

