Why I picked an apprenticeship over going solo

I almost did this alone. Bought the courses, wrote the side projects, applied to jobs. Then I joined Coding Temple's apprenticeship a year ago and stopped almost-doing.

What changed:

Code review. Real, harsh, weekly code review. The kind where someone you respect tells you the cute abstraction you're proud of is going to be a maintenance burden in three months. You can't get this from a YouTube tutorial.

Production failures. I've broken things in front of users now. I've felt the pager go off. I've written postmortems. None of that happens when you're building todo apps for nobody.

A network of people one year ahead. The peers who started six months before me are exactly the right amount of ahead. Far enough to teach me, close enough to remember what was confusing.

What going solo gives you that an apprenticeship doesn't:

• Speed. You ship what you want, when you want.
• Specialization. You can rabbit-hole on one stack for a year.
• Lower opportunity cost if you're already employed.

If I were starting over: Apprenticeship if I had ≤ 1 year of code experience. Solo + open source + freelance if I had 3+ years and just needed reps.

You don't need permission to start, but you also don't have to start alone.