Trying to make a comeback into dev after a 2-year gap — feeling pretty lost, honest advice welcome

Hey everyone,

This is a bit of a personal one, but I could really use some outside perspective from people who've actually been through something similar.

Quick backstory: I got into this field through competitive programming — grinded Codeforces, CodeChef, LeetCode, did a bunch of contests, and eventually parlayed that into a junior software developer job. Things were going fine. Then something happened in my personal life (don't really want to get into the details) that pulled me completely out of the field for almost two years. No coding, no job, basically nothing.

Now I'm trying to come back, and honestly, I don't know where to start. Two years is a long time in this industry, and it feels like everything shifted while I was gone — especially with AI tools changing how people work and even what a "junior developer" is supposed to look like now. I keep going back and forth in my head: do I pick up roughly where I left off, do I need a completely different roadmap, is it even still worth getting into dev right now given how AI is messing with junior hiring?

I still love this field, that part hasn't changed. But I'm stuck between wanting to jump back in and being scared I'm making the wrong call by not just doing something else entirely with my life.

If you've had a career gap, pivoted mid-career, or just have opinions on breaking back into dev in 2026, I'd genuinely appreciate hearing them — good, bad, blunt, whatever. Not looking for sugar-coating, just real talk from people who've actually lived through this kind of thing.

A few specific things I'd love input on:

• How do you even start rebuilding momentum after a long gap away?
• Is DSA / competitive programming still worth grinding for junior roles, or has that changed a lot?
• What should someone actually be learning right now, realistically, given how fast things are moving?
• Anyone here gone through something similar and come out the other side — what actually worked for you?

Thanks for reading this far. Even a single sentence of advice means a lot right now.