In my country, we rarely use software or professional services for filing personal income tax. Not for most people unless you have special circumstances which are usually reserved for super high networth individuals.
What my local IRS did is sensible default. Employment income are submitted electronically to my IRS from most employers. Deductions and reliefs are automatically factored in if it relates to other government services (e.g. reliefs for child).
What I love most is for information that they don't have information on, such as deductible expenses for rental income, they suggest a default of 15% expenses where we don't have to provide any proof or documentation. It is a 15% deduction over the rental income that's just given to you. Of course, we can challenge it if we feel we should have higher deductions, providing them with the necessary documents.
> No lawyer, accountant, doctor, engineer, scientist or other professional stands up each day to report to their peers on their progress.
My experience when I was a tax accountant, we have a weekly status checks for around 20 people which took 1 hour, different seniors and managers breathing down your neck everyday on the progress of their projects.
As a junior, I have to manage the expectations of these managers competing for my time to prioritize their client. Sure we don't have daily standups, but I will choose daily standups over this.
I have roughly the same background with you (self-taught, no bootcamp, freelance, etc). The difference is that I got my first dev job in 2017. What you have experienced is what I have experienced as well.
Learning and understanding legacy codebase is part and parcel of being a software engineer. So be prepared that you will take a long time, especially at the initial stage to add feature. And for legacy codebase, a lot of work revolves around maintenance, cleaning, minor improvements. While looking at it individually, it might not sound like much, but taken together, it has great impact to performance, maintainability and speed of development in the future.
What I have learn is most software engineers understand this. And they also do not expect you to contribute in terms of adding the challenging features that you talk about.
What I can encourage you to do is to ask questions as much as possible. And if you know someone in your team is working on the challenging features, maybe request to pair with the person, or ask the person if he has the time to go through what he has done with you.
I am a self-taught software engineer back in 2016. After launching my first SaaS, I realise for me to grow, I need to learn from people way better than me. I manage to find my first software engineering job in 2017 and never look back.
I believe the best way to learn is from people better than you. The problem with small projects is that it never make it to the point where certain skills/practices become important or even critical.
In this spirit, my recommendation is in this order:
1. Get a job. Learn how to work in a team.
2. If for some reasons, this is not possible, watch conference talks especially on those problems faced by big companies, and what do they do to solve it. Learn about this problem, and figure out other ways.
I know about the book Concurrent Data Processing in Elixir when I am trying to pick up Broadway and GenStage. Do you have any other recommendations?