I'm a solo, self-taught dev too. I feel your pain. I've tried to integrate into the community, but the local meetups happen during my work hours, and conferences only come up every so often, so my opportunities are limited.
I read a lot, and I've contributed quite a bit to many of the open source libraries that our app uses (though that's slowed down as my development load has increased). I attended RailsConf as an opportunity scholar last year, which was a great experience.
I've tried to embrace it. Being involved in all areas of the stack is a really cool, and lets me chuckle at all the posts questioning whether full-stack developers really exist. Like all less-experienced devs I make some ugly code from time to time. Refactoring is relatively easy though because it was my code in the first place and it only interacts with other code that I wrote, because I wrote ALL the code. Open source has taught me that altering other people's code is a lot harder.
If I ever get a job working with other developers it's going to be bizarre. I'll have experience up and down the stack and a history of product architecting and management, but no experience in scrum, pair programming, or any of the other techniques that allow developers to be productive together without sabotaging one another.
I haven't gotten in to open source. That's a great idea! I'm thinking about going to the Vue conference next month, that would be an awesome opportunity for learning and meeting people. Keep up the good work, sounds like you're doing some cool stuff :)
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I'm a solo, self-taught dev too. I feel your pain. I've tried to integrate into the community, but the local meetups happen during my work hours, and conferences only come up every so often, so my opportunities are limited.
I read a lot, and I've contributed quite a bit to many of the open source libraries that our app uses (though that's slowed down as my development load has increased). I attended RailsConf as an opportunity scholar last year, which was a great experience.
I've tried to embrace it. Being involved in all areas of the stack is a really cool, and lets me chuckle at all the posts questioning whether full-stack developers really exist. Like all less-experienced devs I make some ugly code from time to time. Refactoring is relatively easy though because it was my code in the first place and it only interacts with other code that I wrote, because I wrote ALL the code. Open source has taught me that altering other people's code is a lot harder.
If I ever get a job working with other developers it's going to be bizarre. I'll have experience up and down the stack and a history of product architecting and management, but no experience in scrum, pair programming, or any of the other techniques that allow developers to be productive together without sabotaging one another.
I haven't gotten in to open source. That's a great idea! I'm thinking about going to the Vue conference next month, that would be an awesome opportunity for learning and meeting people. Keep up the good work, sounds like you're doing some cool stuff :)