Nobody tells you that university and self-taught development are almost completely separate tracks. Here's what actually worked for me and what didn't.
Suprim Khatri
Backend Developer · March 10, 2026
If you're a CS student learning to code on your own, you're living two parallel lives.
There's university Java assignments, theory exams, CPU scheduling numericals, UML diagrams. Then there's the real world track you're running on the side building actual projects, learning frameworks, taking small client gigs, staying up too late debugging things that have nothing to do with your syllabus.
Both matter. They just matter differently.
I didn't come from a family of developers. I got my first laptop after class 12 and just started building things. First it was Django, then React, then Next.js. I stayed in the Next.js world for a long time long enough to actually get good at it. Fullstack with Next.js made sense to me. I built projects, understood the patterns, got comfortable.
Then I wanted to learn actual backend. Not Next.js API routes real backend. I had three options: NestJS, Express, or Go. I chose Express because the concepts would transfer anywhere. Backend is backend. Learn it once, apply it everywhere.
That logic was right. I'm glad I didn't start with Go the learning curve would have been brutal on top of learning backend concepts from scratch.
Everyone talks about how university is disconnected from industry. That's true. But there are things you get from a CS degree that self-teaching doesn't give you easily.
Data structures and algorithms really understanding them, not just knowing they exist. When I did tree traversals, sorting algorithms, and graph problems during exams, I wasn't just memorizing. I was building intuition for how data moves.
OS concepts CPU scheduling, page faults, the banker's algorithm. You'll never implement these yourself. But understanding them makes you a better developer because you understand what's running underneath your code.
Theory you won't Google. Nobody Googles "explain Belady's anomaly at 2am." But if you've studied it, it's somewhere in your brain when it matters.
Scars.
Real projects break in ways assignments never do. A client wants something by a deadline and your auth isn't working and you don't know why that teaches you more than any exam.
The ability to figure things out. University gives you problems with known solutions. Real development gives you problems where you're not sure a solution exists yet. Learning to sit with that uncertainty and dig until something works that's a self-taught skill.
Portfolio proof. Your degree proves you studied. Your GitHub proves you built. Both matter, but one is harder to fake.
Through a mix of university and self-teaching, here's where I landed:
Frontend: React, Next.js, Tailwind. I'm comfortable here.
Backend: Express first, now moving to Go with Gin.
Database: PostgreSQL. Raw SQL is growing on me.
Tooling: Turborepo for monorepos, Docker basics, Vercel for hosting.
None of this came from a curriculum. It came from building things, breaking them, and asking questions until they made sense.
Don't skip your exams for side projects. And don't skip side projects for your exams.
The students who do well are the ones running both tracks simultaneously studying what they need to pass, building what they need to grow. It's tiring. It's worth it.
You won't know if any of it leads anywhere. Nobody does. But the alternative waiting until you feel ready, waiting until you have the right setup, waiting until AI stops being scary is worse.
Start. Break things. Figure it out. Repeat.