First dev job after 135 applications and eight hard months

It took eight hard months, 135 applications, and interviews with 15 different companies before I finally landed my first developer job as a Frontend Engineer. The arc of those 240 days reads almost cinematic now, but living through it was grinding and slow. The first few months I did what most bootcamp grads do: blasted out applications through job boards, tailored nothing, and wondered why I kept getting ghosted. I think I sent around 80 that way before I accepted the strategy wasn't working. The shift that changed things was dropping generic listings entirely and going straight to people. I started doing cold outreach to senior engineers and engineering managers on LinkedIn, keeping the messages short, specific, and built around something real I'd noticed about their product or stack. Most never replied, but the ones who did opened doors the job board route never would have. That's how the offer that mattered came through. Alongside the outreach, I started treating every surface of my professional presence like a product I had to ship. The portfolio got rebuilt twice, the resume got stripped down until every line earned its spot, and I wrote and rewrote a two-sentence pitch until I could say it without thinking. I also made a ↓