My magical first job as a self-taught software engineer

I’m a self-taught software engineer. No formal courses. No internship. Being self-taught means I have some noticeable gaps in my technical knowledge. But that never stopped me, much to the chagrin of my coworkers.

I found my first job by searching “web development” on Indeed. I sent my nearly-empty CV (I mowed grass and worked at Dairy Queen prior to this) to a dozen companies and got a single call back. They wanted me to take a timed code challenge. I didn’t know what that meant, but sure! It was in a language called PHP, whatever…