From IT Support to Full Stack Developer: My Self Taught Journey
How a single batch script in IT support led me down the rabbit hole of web development, and what 5 years of self teaching looks like.
Five years ago, I was working in IT support. My days consisted of fixing windows, installing software, resetting passwords, and explaining to people that yes, you do need to restart your computer 😒.
Then one day, I got sick of doing the same repetitive task over and over. So I wrote a batch script to automate it. And that was it - that was the moment everything changed.
The YouTube Bootcamp
I didn’t have money for expensive coding bootcamps. So YouTube became my classroom. For about 18 months, I watched tutorials and built random stuff nobody asked for, I may not know I’m doing it right or wrong, but I enjoyed the journey of building. Todo apps, weather apps, calculators, you name it! I probably built a terrible version of it.
The trick wasn’t watching tutorials. It was building things right after watching them, preferably something slightly different from the tutorial. That gap between the tutorial and your own idea is where actual learning happens.
Getting Into React & Next.js
JavaScript was the natural starting point from web tutorials, and yes I fell into the loop of which framework to choose (That time IIRC Angular and React was the hype). After years of wasting time I finally moved to React(😅) because every job listing seemed to want it.
My core stack became:
- React for frontend
- Node.js & Express for backend
- PostgreSQL for databases
First Real Job: Multivariate
Eventually, I got hired at Multivariate as an early stage developer. When I joined, we were just 2 devs. When I left, we were 5. I was so happy with my front end skills for a year, then a strange situation to fix a bug in production made me to touch the backend code, later nodejs and postgresql became my daily bread and butter.
Working at a small company taught me things no tutorial ever could:
- How to run sprints and ship features on time
- Setting up monitoring with Sentry (because things will break in production)
- SEO isn’t just meta tags - it’s page speed, structured data, content strategy
- Code review isn’t about catching bugs, it’s about sharing knowledge
The AI Rabbit Hole
Lately, I’ve been deep into AI integration. Not the “slap ChatGPT on everything” kind, but genuinely useful AI that solves real problems.
I built Mindly - basically a second brain for forgetful people like me. It’s an AI powered personal assistant that actually remembers context and helps you stay on top of things.
The AI tooling space is moving crazy fast. I’ve been working with:
- Google ADK for building AI agents
- Vercel AI SDK for streaming AI responses
- Mastra SDK for multi-agent systems
- ComfyUI for image generation workflows
What I’ve Learned
If I had to distill 5 years of self teaching into a few takeaways:
- Build things you actually want to use. The motivation sustains itself.
- Don’t chase frameworks. Learn fundamentals well, and switching frameworks becomes trivial.
- AI helps, but it’s not magic. You still need to understand what you’re building.
- The best time to start was yesterday. The second best time is now.
If you’re on a similar journey - starting from scratch, self teaching through free resources - just know that it works. It’s slower, it’s messier, but the code doesn’t care where you learned to write it.
Want to chat about dev stuff or work together? Book a call or find me on GitHub.