It took eight hard months, 135 applications, and interviews with 15 different companies before I landed my first developer job as a Frontend Engineer.
The first few months I 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. 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 rule for myself: between every round of applications I had to build or meaningfully extend a project. It kept my skills moving, but more practically it meant every interview I walked into ↓