How do I know when I'm ready to apply for a junior developer job?

You will almost certainly never feel ready — that feeling arrives well after you've been employed for a while, not before. The useful question isn't 'do I feel ready' but 'can I demonstrate the specific things a junior is hired for', and that has a reasonably objective bar. The practical checklist for junior web roles: 1. You can build a small app end to end without a tutorial — interface, some logic, data storage, deployed to a live URL. Not perfectly; independently. 2. You have two or three finished projects online, at least one of which isn't a tutorial clone, each with a real README explaining decisions. 3. You use Git normally — commits, branches, pushing to GitHub — without it being an event. 4. You can read an error message, form a hypothesis and debug without immediately asking someone. 5. You can explain your own code and why you made a choice. Interviews are largely this. 6. You know enough of the fundamentals to hold a conversation: how the web works at a basic level (request/response, what an API is), core language features, and basic data structures. If you can tick most of those, you're at the level a junior role expects — because juniors are hired for trajectory and teachability, not for knowing everything. Companies expect to teach you their codebase, their tools and their process. Nobody hiring a junior thinks you'll be productive in week one. What to do about the readiness feeling itself: - Start applying while you keep learning, not after. Applications take weeks or months to convert, so the process running in parallel costs you nothing and saves months of waiting. - Treat early interviews as free diagnostics. Each one tells you exactly which gaps are real, which is far better information than guessing. Being rejected from your first several is normal and not evidence you were wrong to try. - Ignore job listing requirements as a threshold. They're wish lists; the '3 years experience' on a junior posting is routinely ignored by the same company that wrote it. Apply at around 50-60% match. The uncomfortable truth: the people who get hired aren't the ones who waited until they felt ready. They're the ones who applied while feeling underqualified, got rejected repeatedly, learned from it, and kept going. Postponing feels safe and responsible; in practice it's the more expensive choice, because it delays the only feedback loop that actually tells you what's missing.