Hi there!
a few month ago I got my first developer job as a Developer for iOS Apps in Swift.
The funny thing about that: I did not actively searched for a job when the offer came. I experimented a little bit with iOS developing ~1,5 years ago and put that on my portfolio website and on my Xing-profile. A few weeks ago I was messaged via Xing chat and was asked if I am still interested in programming Swift. I had a nice phone interview that felt very natural, a few weeks later I got a contract and my first project to work on.
Right now, it is a part-time job because I am also studying right now (finishing my master’s programme). The job is fully remote and when I am finished, there is the option to dive right into full-time.
In fact I did not do a lot of courses at freeCodeCamp. I worked very long on my portfolio because I had a lot of fun tweaking stuff and programming small JavaScript stuff for it.
A portfolio programmed and designed by yourself is a very valuable piece of code for a newcoming developer I think. Besides the possibility to show off small newcomer projects, more important in my opinion is to show off the portfolio as a meaningful project itself.
I had quite a good overview of HTML, CSS and some JavaScript before but I did not work on any bigger projects. In general I do have trouble with learning programming skills without any “real” project. Therefore the idea of building a portfolio from ground up was a very valuable experience.
The portfolio made a quite good impression during the phone interview for my current job, because I could just reference to it. I also got a quite nice and short top-level domain for it. The portfolio also helped me finding an industrial project partner for my master’s thesis 
Lessons I have learned so far:
- Start your own projects (e.g. portfolio)
- do not try to learn a lot of frameworks, just start programming. I did a lot of Python web-programming before that Swift job because of a university project.
- do not be to focussed on knowing everything by heart. More important is to know your tools (Webbrowser, Git and preferred text editor).
- a lot of programming involves googling, experimenting and trying out stuff. No one opens his or her editor, hacks down a project, compiles that and is finished.
- test your code often, use comments
- during my telephone interview I was very honest about my very small projects in Swift (like doing some HTTP-Requests and programming a small memory game).
- as a developer, there is no “I can not do that”. There is only “I have not done that before”. Like I said before: Programming involves a lot of googling, often resulting in reading stack overflow threads.
- Do not focus too much on specific JavaScript hacking stuff (even worse: specific frameworks) when you do not need it. Everything is more or less the same in every programming language. Instead get known to basic concepts, e.g. HTTP, like doing GET and POST Request, parsing JSON, downloading and uploading stuff from servers, learn working in the terminal and so on.
In my opinion JavaScript is not the best way to learn any of that. For example try Python and Flask. You can talk about and understand how a lot of internet stuff works if you master some basic principles.
Feel free to ask anything! Because of some privacy concerns, I do not like to share a public link to my portfolio. If you are interested, write a nice PM 
Best regards,
Michael