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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 client full-stack projects some times more complex than others, and the occasional AI project. This post is about how I got here: college during COVID, a remote bootcamp, side projects like the one that won a Codecademy AI Bootcamp, and what keeps me motivated to ship and learn in public.

Short story

I Slowly started after my music college back in my teenage years. After music college I was around 19 / 20 yeas old when I got into tech or IT at the time it was a IT Course in my city. I started with a year of college during COVID, which was a difficult time for everyone, and then committed to a full-year remote full-stack bootcamp from home.

What stayed with me wasn't just the coursework, but the habit of building and building more. I dont need to explain my self to anyone because you can see the work I have done and effort I made. I'm self-taught I have put in the time and effort to learn what I know now.

I have met some amazing people in the tech community that have helped me and supported me but ive also met some people that have been toxic and have been a negative influence on my life, 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 got charged based on usage for hosting what was basically 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 growing my skill set and learning in public because it keeps me accountable and, hopefully, helps other developers on a similar path.

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'm focused on continuing to improve my portfolio, sharpen my skills, and explore 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 full-stack bootcamp remotely from home over one year.

  • 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 28 – Dec 2025).

  • 2026 — Continued working on my Projects and Freelancing.

Key takeaways:

  • Learning in public 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 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, especially when you're not given a fair chance. After four years of learning, I know my skill set and what I'm worth as a junior to mid-level developer in Ireland—especially in the current economy.

I consider myself primarily self-taught. Most of what I use day-to-day I learned through building projects. While I've completed courses and bootcamps, I've gained more from independent learning. I used to rely on visual learning, but I've since shifted toward learning by doing—taking notes when diving deep into new topics.

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!