DEV Community: Yavor Dimitrov

From being a self-taught developer to launching a SaaS

Yavor Dimitrov — Tue, 30 Sep 2025 14:31:41 +0000

Hey guys,

It has been a long time since I last posted on here about my journey as a self-taught developer and landing a first job. I had actually forgotten about it, and was amazing to see all the responses I had on here.

Now feels the right time to share another personal story and how I came to the decision to launch my own SaaS.

Throughout my time working as a developer across different companies, documentation was always one of those things we desperately needed but never had time for. It constantly got postponed because there was always something more urgent to do.

That’s why I came to the decision to build DocOnce.

DocOnce automatically generates documentation in Notion directly from your GitHub PRs. You simply sign in with GitHub, choose a branch you’d like to track (e.g., /feature), and clean, structured docs appear in Notion—without you having to stop coding or switch tasks.

If I have to be honest, it is nerve-wrecking to share a product publicly that is just an MvP, and definitely not perfect. However, I truly believe with AI, and the speed with which we can ship products, this sort of way of launching, as opposed to VC funded start-ups, opens up a way to build together with a community, build something that is actually useful to people, and keep shaping/adjusting it as you go along.

I am really excited about this, and would love to chat with as many people as possible. Here is the link to the launch, if anyone is interested:

https://www.producthunt.com/products/doconce-2?launch=doconce-2

and here is the link to the actual app:

https://www.doconce.com/

I’d love for you to give it a try and let me know your thoughts.
Thanks for taking the time to check it out!

Crossword puzzle generator

Yavor Dimitrov — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 15:08:05 +0000

The code is on GitHub here ---> Link

The first reason that I want to share this is that I only found one solution online to a crossword puzzle generator, which I found quite complex to read and follow, so I feel it would definitely be of use to share the link to my solution with you.
The second reason for sharing is that as you probably know, most of the time one can spend hours solving a coding problem for an interview, and receive a 1-second generic reply, in the end, offering no feedback at all. Therefore, I would be really grateful if I could get some feedback on the code for my solution.

(SOLUTION: My solution is not meant to generate different puzzles, there is a list of hardcoded words, which are turned into a crossword. However, the main functionality is there. I spend a very limited amount of time on it, and went about it the MVP way - get the app working, and handle the most important cases).

Thank you in advance for any feedback. I hope this post can be of use to other people presented with the same, or similar task. Also, I would be very happy if others can gain insight by reading the feedback and reviewing the code so that we can all learn from each other and improve.

Getting employed as a self-taught developer with no degree, no experience, and no investment!

Yavor Dimitrov — Sat, 08 Aug 2020 09:45:18 +0000

In my journey to getting a Front-End developer job, I was inspired by every personal story I read online and every resource that I came across that was sincerely aimed at helping others. All articles that shared people’s challenges, thoughts, and vision were like a breath of fresh air for me, as they offered insights, motivation, or simply reinforced my decision to be on that specific path. Therefore, I am going to share a bit about my story with you, as I believe there can never be too many articles that would take away the value of sharing knowledge and experience or the feeling of belonging to a community.

The most important step to take:

Before sharing more about my journey, I would like to straight away emphasize on applying to jobs from the moment you have created your first personal project. If you don’t read the rest of the article, this is the number one thing that I hope makes an impact on you, as I truly and fully believe that it will translate into direct value creation for you and your career. Feeling that you’re not prepared or you need to take your best shot in landing a job, as there aren’t that many job posts is a completely normal way to feel, but that is entirely subjective due to the uncertainty around being a beginner, but it has nothing to do with reality. Job boards change every day and get updated with new openings, and the experience requirements on those job posts should be completely ignored. I would recommend having two main pillars that keep you motivated to apply:

practicing interviews and exploring the job market requirements
getting a job as early as possible so that you get paid to keep learning.

Before I had landed my first job, I had a constant feeling that I am completely unprepared to be a developer, but once I started working, I realized that I could’ve got a job 3-4 months earlier with just JS, CSS and HTML and that would mean that I would get paid to learn React.js in my case, rather than me knowing it already (which is what a colleague of mine is doing).

The tech I learned:

The route I took in learning is I learned JS, CSS, and HTML and then went on to learning React, which I would recommend to others as it’s high in demand. After learning React and creating your first project, you should learn Redux, as it’s the most popular framework for handling state management in React if you decide to go down that path. In my opinion, another very important step to take is creating a project, which fetches data from a database, as most companies will do just that. Firebase by Google is a great technology to use, as it is serverless, which means you won’t have to spend time learning and building a server, which will give you more time to focus on your Front-End skills and still be able to showcase a project, which resembles a real-world product.

The learning resources I used:

In my learning process, I didn’t go to boot camp and I didn’t pay for any resources, courses, or mentors. If you’re also in a position, where you don’t have the time or money to invest in learning, I would recommend the youtube channels TraversyMedia, CoderFoundry, Fun Fun function, which are extremely professional and highly invested in truly helping and creating value for you as a beginner programmer. Freecodecamp is also a great resource when getting started on your journey. The above-mentioned free online resources have more than enough materials to completely cover you from starting out with no knowledge and experience to landing an actual job.

To structure and organize my learning, I followed the step-by-step guide in this article https://medium.com/zerotomastery/learn-to-code-in-2019-get-hired-and-have-fun-along-the-way-d4197f96be27, which was extremely helpful in motivating me to keep going and monitoring my progress. The guy who wrote it - Andrei Neagoie has many other super interesting and helpful articles, which you can also check out.

To conclude and highlight the most important takeaways from this article:

Apply to jobs straight away after creating your first project
Keep learning and keep a structure of what comes next on your learning agenda
Create a project, which implements a database, such as Firebase
Don’t get discouraged, as the question is not how, but when - getting hired is just a matter of time!

As this is my first article sharing my experience, I hope I have been able to add some value and I would be more than happy to offer further help, guidance or just having a conversation with a likeminded individual, so feel free to drop me an email at yavor.v.dimitrov@gmail.com