(for reference, I’m currently 19 years old)
About a year ago, I was in a similar position, where my general knowledge of computers and web/software development was limited to “Oh yeah I finished three courses on codecademy and made a javascript Idle game”. I started applying for internships at local tech companies (I live in a somewhat urban area, so there were a few to choose from), and wasn’t getting anywhere. I had a job as a cashier making minimum wage with no benefits, stuck living at home after barely graduating high school.
Then, one of the companies contacted me, and offered me an internship under the agreement that they would teach me what I needed to know, and that if I was making good progress while learning, they would hire me within a month. I’ve been doing work with them for nearly a year now, and I learned literally more in that month than I did with 4+ years of messing around on CC.
So, some advice and resources on how to make what skills you have look professional:
Learn PHP and MySQL, and learn how to set up a locally hosted server stack, LAMP being the most common (Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP). From there, you can set up a WordPress installation, which has some really nice out-of-the-box themes that look professional, but you’ll probably want to poke around and find a free one that you like.
From there, you can create a child theme, and mess around with the styling, and if you’re feeling really adventurous, you can try creating your own PHP templates.
Once you have a local environment that you think looks nice, version control it with Git, and see about setting up a free EC2 Instance on AWS (amazon web services) to host it on. From there, you have a nice, professional looking portfolio with whatever customization you’ve added that’s accessible to anyone you give the URL to. It’s impressive to any place that you apply to, because it demonstrates a basic understanding of technology stacks and how they interact with each other.
At the end of the day, the most important part is being willing to dedicate yourself to learning. Not many companies are going to be willing to take on an intern who’s not motivated to solve problems themselves. And hey, even if you don’t get the job, you’ve got a cool website up that you can do whatever you want to.
RESOURCES:
The above link is a fantastic reference on setting up a LAMP Stack on Ubuntu 16.04 (ubuntu is a linux operating system that is extremely user friendly)
A guide for setting up WordPress on the aforementioned LAMP Stack
https://codex.wordpress.org/
An extremely in depth repository of all wordpress functions, hooks, functionality, hierarchies, and more.
All of the things that I’ve said thus far are entirely subjective. There’s dozens of technology stacks and languages out there that are easy to learn if you’re willing to dedicate your time, but from what I’ve discovered, WP is one of the easiest, and it has the additional benefit of being the architecture that roughly 20% of the websites in the world use.
Good luck finding a career that works for you!