We’re talking 5 months or so… An internship is a very reasonable goal; and a very good bet at a breakthrough, considering the lack of a degree. To reminisce when I was green in the field; it all began with an internship. So, if I were in your shoes, I would focus more on networking with the local tech community than coding marathons for 5 months. Here’s why:

Unless you have a target company in mind; there’s so many companies in kenya all using a variety of tech stack, with different design patterns and coding standards (mostly dependent on the competency of the devs). Investing the majority of your time doubling down on a stack, would only be detrimental to you, as it’ll narrow down the jobs you’d be applying to. You’ll consider yourself an ‘expert’ in the stack and be more biased by filtering jobs with that stack. As an intern, you’ll rarely be building apps from the ground up, you’ll be lucky to contribute a production codebase.

Development is an ever changing field, innovation requires constant learning. Hence, you’ll never be ready, no matter how many months you put into focused learning. By the time you wake up from your ‘hole’, there’ll be new releases in like 50 dependencies of any one project/ framework. It’s probably why most ‘mid-size’ companies don’t bother upgrading their legacy systems; if it works, why bother, you’re better off investing the capital in other areas of your business, than paying the huge number of devs you’d need. And these should be your target, higher probability to get an in.

The companies that often need interns with no college degree, and not junior developers, are mostly cash-strapped. So:

they might not have an advertisement budget/ platform(career section in their site) the job requirement might be written by a clueless HR or Hiring manager, that no intern would believe that the advert is for an internship position they’ll be more reliant on their network when sourcing, that is devs or company employees in general. they’re open to taking anyone in, papers rarely mean anything. They’d rather have an intern who’ll show some enthusiasm in their product, than a super qualified competent dev that’ll bolt out of there at the sign of a better opportunity. Businesses love a stable and grateful staff. the interview process is most probably just one round. You have better chances bullshitting the technical stuff and striking a rapport with your interviewer, than ‘wowing’ your interviewer with your exceptional tech skills that you picked up in months. Even the more reason to network with the local dev community, you might probably meet your next interview in this bunch. If you go out to a social event with an aim, your chances of success are greatly improved. You will fail a bunch of times, but you’ll be in control: of who to follow up with of who you’d love to work with of first hand info of where you stand of the scene, a casual place where you’re more comfortable and can openly vet, including salary/ stipend figures . So, if I were in your shoes, I’d get off my room and start mingling. Because if you can go to a club and get a stranger to follow you back to your place, all in one night. Imagine the possibilities with a 5 month timeline. Like you said, you already have projects deployed in github, so the lingo isn’t an issue. PS, there are Technical managers with no idea of how version control works; the IT field is too wide to know everything and very diverse to limit yourself. Cast your net wide.

Good Luck!!