Atomic Dev Tips is an ongoing series of short, actionable, high-leverage, (almost) daily tips on launching and growing a successful developer career.

One of the things that I hear most often when I talk about my story of becoming a developer is that I was lucky. The stars aligned, everything worked out, and a job was thrust upon me.

While luck certainly plays a factor in launching and growing careers, we commit a dangerous fallacy when we say it's the only thing that matters.

We can influence luck. We can increase our odds of a coincidence happening to us. By being proactive in our careers and creating a portfolio of real-world projects and taking the initiative to meet other developers, potential employers, and recruiters, we can exponentially increase the odds that we'll "get lucky" and land that job.

There are better ways to build a career than the classic spray and pray approach of blasting applications and resumes across the Internet.

By building a targeted portfolio of projects that solve real problems and introducing yourself to people that can help you, you drastically increase your odds of landing a great job.

P.S. I cover this idea and the process of achieving it in my new workshop, Create & Connect. It's a concise, efficient method to land your first job as a self-taught developer with no formal education and no experience.