College Developer Struggles

Dev Leader Weekly 113

Oct 25, 2025

TL; DR:

Setting boundaries is important!
Find time for hands-on experience!
Check out the livestream (or watch the recording) on Monday, October 27th at 7:00 PM Pacific!

Time and Energy in College as a Developer

You’re juggling classes, maybe freelancing, maybe a part‑time job, maybe family obligations. Some weeks feel like 12 hours a day, back to back.

I get it. I’ve been in university grinding out homework for classes I’m not excited about, wrapping up lab reports, and cramming for exams. In the workplace, I’ve had on‑call shifts that start at 6 a.m. and days packed with meetings until 6 p.m. Regardless of work or school, it’s not sustainable if you don’t build guardrails.

The goal here is simple: focus your time and energy so you actually make progress -- in school, in skill building, and in your career runway.

This isn’t a silver bullet, but I have thoughts based on my own path and coaching a lot of early‑career engineers. In fact, I talked about this recently on Code Commute in response to a submitted question:

The Order of Operations

Here’s the simple stack rank I recommend for most students trying to break into a career in software development:

Stay in school and finish. Degrees aren’t everything, but they still open doors. If money gets tight, pause -- don’t quit.
Pursue internships aggressively. This is the most direct way to earn signal that recruiters and managers recognize. Even if your school doesn’t have a pipeline, you can still land them.
Build, build, build. As much as you can, try building real software. Break out of the tutorial-hell loop and spend time building applications.
Freelance if you can. It’s real‑world experience with customers, scope, constraints, and delivery. Those are professional muscles most students don’t get to train.
Apply to roles selectively and continuously. It keeps your resume sharp, your interview muscles warm, and your market awareness current.

If you can’t juggle all of them, drop the broad job‑search for now and double down on internships plus project-building/freelancing. Those build the most leverage for your resume and your learning.

And I get it -- not everyone can dive right into freelancing. I am one of those people! It’s a great option if you can build those skills and land those opportunities, but otherwise... build projects regardless!

Why Internships Matter So Much

Companies that run internship programs are explicitly asking for junior talent. They’re signaling “we want students.” That cuts through so much noise, and while it doesn’t mean it’s “easy” to get an internship, at least you know the people on the other end are absolutely looking for junior developers.

If your school has a co‑op office or a career portal, great. If not, you still have options:

Search directly on company careers pages for “Intern,” “Co‑op,” or “New Grad” roles.
Cold email the hiring manager or recruiter with a short, targeted note and a link to one strong project. Don’t know who they are? See if you can find any contact and ask if they can direct you to a recruiter.
Ask professors or local meetup organizers if they know teams hiring interns. Warm intros go a long way.
Treat the internship search as a project you own: a target list, weekly outreach goals, and a spreadsheet to track follow-ups.

Paid vs unpaid is situational across countries. If unpaid is the norm where you live, weigh it honestly against your finances. You might run a hybrid semester: paid freelancing to fund an unpaid internship that gives you career signal. There’s no one-size-fits-all advice here, but finding internship opportunities is certainly awesome experience.

Freelancing Is Not “Just Side Work”

A friendly reminder for you: Turning ideas into invoices is a skill. You learn scoping, estimation, communication, and delivery. You get feedback from real customers. That’s gold.

If you can choose between a solo side project and a paid freelance project that still lets you learn, pick the freelance one. Same code. Extra reps talking to humans. And a testimonial at the end. Some developers go most of their careers without direct interaction with clients and end-users!

These are skills that you’ll build in addition to the technical skills you’re honing in your chosen programming languages and tech stacks. These are skills that can help differentiate you not only on your resume, but on the job when you’ve landed your role!

What To Practice Weekly

Your schedule is packed. Cool. Use this compact plan. Five blocks, 90 minutes each, every week. If you can’t do five, do three. Consistency beats heroics. Find what you can stay consistent with.

Core CS/Math Refresh
Data structures, complexity, and math you’re rusty on. You don’t need to become a theorist -- just competence. Focus on understanding over memorization. I’m many years into my career now, and this is something that even I need to do if I want to go hunting for a new role.
Build & Ship
Pick one small project and ship a vertical slice end-to-end. UI mock to live link. Repeat. Shipping cadence matters more than project size. This is something you’ll be doing “in the real world” so it’s an excellent muscle to build.
Internship Pipeline
Source 5 roles, send 3 targeted applications, and 2 follow-ups. Keep a tracker. This is a flywheel -- it compounds. Your mileage may vary, so find targets you can hit.
Freelance/Client Work
While this may not be applicable for everyone, it’s worth considering how to invest some time into this. Can you build websites or tools for local businesses? If you have a client (or several), dedicate time to delivering on their asks and ensuring you are writing up communication to them.
Career Assets
Update your resume, portfolio, GitHub README, and a short blurb about your latest project. Capture metrics and links. Future you will thank you. We do this kind of thing in the workplace too when there are periodic manager checkins and/or performance reviews.

Bonus if you can squeeze it in: one hour for interview practice. Rotate problem solving, system design at a simple scale, and behavioral answers with stories.

How To Choose Projects That Actually Help

Filter every project idea through these four questions:

Will I learn a skill companies ask for? AI, Cloud basics, APIs, auth, simple databases, testing, CI. What are companies looking for that you’re interested in?
Can I ship a thin slice in two weeks? If not, break it down. This is a key skill as a software developer.
Will this help on a resume? Real code, real constraints, or measurable outcomes. Is there a way you can highlight your learnings through this?
Can I demo it in under three minutes? If you have the opportunity to show it off on a portfolio page or discuss it in an interview, you’ll want to make sure you can talk about it clearly.

Great project themes:

A simple SaaS with login, billing stub, and one useful feature.
A migration tool that moves content from A to B. Can you use a queue? Any resiliency that you can add?
A dashboard that pulls data from an API, caches results, and shows trending insights.
A “make other devs faster” tool -- linters, code‑mod, or small CLI utilities.

Don’t be afraid to build things that are playgrounds for you to learn new tech. That’s how I navigated my entire time while in school.

The Resume That Gets You Calls

While it’s not a hard rule, try to keep it to a page or two. Use verbs, numbers, and outcomes. Focus on impact and learning, not chores.

Project: “Course Planner” -- Built in tech stack X, cut schedule conflicts by 80 percent for 50 students by modeling prerequisites and time windows; deployed to free tier on platform XYZ with CI technology ABC.
Freelance: migrated local shop from slow CMS to static site on tech stack X; load time from 3.8s to 1.1s; inquiries up 27 percent in 30 days.
Internship: implemented endpoint caching in tech stack ABC and reduced p95 latency 35 percent; wrote runbook that cut issue investigation time by 20 percent.

If you can’t quantify, describe consequences: fewer manual steps, safer deploys, simpler onboarding. It can be difficult for folks with full-time careers in software engineering to do this effectively, and it’s even more challenging when you’re starting out. Try though. Fall back to things you learned because this demonstrates your initiative to grow and improve.

Plus, you can always check out one of my YouTube channels where I do resume reviews!

Boundaries That Protect Your Energy

Remote study and work feel flexible until they consume your day. Guard your time. This is likely a time in your life where you’re juggling a lot of things, especially if you’re living away from home for the first time and you also need to pay for your education.

Daily shutdown ritual. Close the laptop, write tomorrow’s top 3, go for a walk.
Use focus blocks. 90 minutes each. Notifications off.
Weekend hard stop. Pick a time and protect it. Your brain consolidates when you rest.

Again, your mileage may vary here. The key point is to ensure you set some boundaries for yourself to help from getting overwhelmed while still trying to progress forward.

Quick Checklist

Your numbers may vary here, but here are some goals you can play with:

Degree plan is intact (pause if needed, don’t quit)
Target list of 20 internship programs with weekly outreach
One active freelance client or scoped prospect
One project shipping thin slices every 2 weeks
Five 90‑minute focus blocks on the calendar for the entire week
Resume and portfolio updated this month with metrics
Weekly shutdown ritual and weekend hard stop
One mock interview completed this month

Final Perspective

There isn’t one right path. But there are clearly better bets:

Finish your degree if you can.
Chase internships hard.
Build projects because this is the most effective way to skill up on the tech side.
Keep freelancing because it grows real‑world muscles.
Apply selectively to stay sharp.
Protect your time so you can show up consistently. That’s how you build signal without burning out.

You don’t need to do everything. You need to do (more of) the right things, regularly, and make them visible. Keep going -- you’re closer than you think. I’m rooting for you.

Dev Leader Weekly