[testfit1]

It will help, but you won't be able to totally level the playing field.

For entry level, recruiters get thousands of candidates. They skim each resume for 30s to decide who to bring on to interview and usually don't have the technical context to understand OSS / side projects. If you don't have a degree you likely won't make it past the screen. Also there are many new grads with impressive OSS contributions / side projects.

Also, making a meaningful OSS contribution is ... hard. You have minimal programming experience, you're going to need to learn a lot just to be able to fix a typo. Not to discourage, but just to put into perspective (I work on OSS for FAANG).

[roadtoswe]

Indeed it is something to think about. I appreciate all the advice you gave. Last question, I'm currently taking CS50's Programming with Python and MITs Intro to CS in Python, what would be a good branching point after those two courses? I know it depends on the individual and their interests, but what would you best recommend with respect to your point of view? I'll also be learning math (calculus, linear algebra) simultaneously, to develop the math background to tackle AI/ML.

[testfit1]

I took Andrew Ng's Coursera ML course but I think it's a bit out of date now. I've heard good things about https://karpathy.ai/zero-to-hero.html to learn AI/ML.

Most tech interviews will have a leetcode component, so I would also take a more advanced algorithms/data structures class like https://www.coursera.org/learn/algorithms-part1

I would also start doing problems on leetcode once you finish the course.