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🚀 My Journey

Published on 28 Feb 2026Career

Intro

Hi, I'm Owen, a full-stack developer from Ireland with over four years of hands-on experience building personal and commissioned projects and the occasional AI project. This post is about how I got here: from college during COVID to award-winning work created at bootcamps, and what keeps me motivated to ship and exhibit my learning process online.

Short story

I built my career steadily after obtaining a diploma in music during my teenage years. After college, it was an IT course that sparked my initial interest in tech. Like many during this time, I began looking for remote opportunities and eventually enrolled in a year-long full-stack bootcamp.

I began creating and deploying projects and learned a lot through the process but what stayed with me was the satisfaction I found in building and rebuilding. I believe the work adequately exhibits my drive: I'm self-taught in many aspects and have put in a great deal of time and effort to learn what I know now.

I have met an abundance of amazing people in my time in tech and I've done what I can to meet my critics with humility and learn from them, which is why I'm not afraid to speak my mind and share my thoughts and opinions.

I've always learned best by doing, and most of what I use day to day came from working on projects and figuring things out hands-on.

Over the years I've worked across a wide range of stacks and tools, from Laravel and Vue to Tailwind and Livewire.

I rebuilt this portfolio from a VILT stack (Vue, Inertia, Laravel) to a Next.js stack so I could take full ownership of the codebase and keep deployment simple and maintainable. That decision came after I tried hosting it on Laravel Cloud.

I like Laravel and would have stayed with it, but I was charged based on usage for hosting what was essentially a simple four-page static portfolio. Other modern providers, like Vercel's Hobby plan can host that for free and you can often run app + database on a VPS for one fixed monthly fee. One week I was charged around €20 for a very small site, so for this project Next.js made more sense. I would use Laravel Cloud more in the future if pricing was more predictable and if I was getting paid more per month by clients for upkeep.

In 2025 I won the Codecademy AI Bootcamp with SpecSage, landed a part-time remote role at rConfig, and kept building side projects while taking on freelance work. I'm still expanding my skillset and exhibiting projects publicly which helps me maintain accountability for my work whilst potentially aiding other developers on similar paths.

The tech hiring landscape in Ireland has been challenging for junior to mid-level developers in recent years. Breaking into the industry hasn't been easy but I remain focused on improving my portfolio, sharpening my skills, and exploring opportunities through freelancing and contract work.

My journey so far

A short roadmap of the last few years:

  • 2022 — Started learning tech; went to college for one year during COVID (hard times).

  • 2023 — Completed a one-year remote full-stack bootcamp.

  • 2024 — Began ramping up my skills and working on projects.

  • 2025 — Won a Codecademy AI Bootcamp with my AI project called SpecSage.tech.

  • 2025 — Landed a part-time remote job at rConfig (Oct – Dec 2025).

  • 2026 — Continued working on my projects and Freelancing.

Key takeaways:

  • Documenting your learning online builds accountability and helps others.
  • Full-stack gives you end-to-end ownership and faster iteration.
  • Side projects are the best way to try new tools and develop ideas.
  • Your path also depends on where you live - you may need to start your own business or do contract work to make a living.
  • Getting into tech is hard, the odds are against you. After four years of learning, I know my skillset and what I'm worth as a junior to mid-level developer in Ireland taking the current economy into account.

Currently learning:

  • Pydantic-AI — type-safe AI framework for Python
  • LLMs — core concepts, prompting, and evaluation strategies
  • RAG — retrieval-augmented generation workflows for grounded AI apps
  • LangChain — orchestration toolkit for LLM-powered applications
  • CrewAI — multi-agent workflows and task coordination
  • LangGraph — building stateful, multi-actor AI applications
  • LlamaIndex — data frameworks for LLM applications

Best of luck to anyone starting out in tech - you have a long way to go!

Thanks for reading!