Get Experience Via Your Own Projects

One thing a lot of people miss out on is how impressive it is to build a full-fledged application by yourself. If you're able to make a frontend talk to a backend, back it up with a database, and maybe even optimize performance a bit-- you're doing the software engineering work of an entire team!

The other benefit people don't realize about personal or side projects is this: despite not having your code reviewed by others, you do end up learning a lot of maintainable patterns and good habits.

This is because it's ultimately you that will need to do the maintenance of the code-- so you quickly learn not to write spaghetti code or do a quick and dirty job. In a sense, you learn the why behind good naming, shorter methods, clean separation of classes, etc.-- because you end up feeling the pain when you don't stick to good coding standards.

These projects are great things you can add under your resume as experience-- especially if you are able to generate revenue from it. And if you can grow it to something like IndieHackers.com -- jobs might just come to you.