I taught myself to code about three years ago. No degree, no bootcamp, just projects, documentation, and a lot of trial and error. It worked. I ship production web apps with Next.js, React, and TypeScript, and I have been paid to do it for real clients.
But teaching yourself has a blind spot. You learn the tools before you learn what sits underneath them. I can use a framework well and still not fully understand the computer science it stands on. For a while that gap stayed hidden. Lately it has started to show up in the kind of problems I want to solve next.
That is why I keep considering a computer science degree, at somewhere like Austin Community College. Part of the reason is practical, since some doors stay closed without the credential. The bigger part is curiosity. I want to understand the layer beneath the code I write every day, not just call the function and move on.
Self teaching got me in the door. A degree would be me deciding to learn the parts I skipped, on purpose this time.