Coincidentally I started playing my top three for the first time starting this year. Its been great finally playing these titles everyone else has been enjoying for years.
I graduated last year and it was a rough search. I think I submitted over 300 applications across LinkedIn, my schools Handshake account, Dice, Welcome to the Jungle, and a few other sites.
I’d honestly recommend just putting a good resume together and going for the spray and pray option with applications. It didn’t seem like anything I did really worked. Career fairs never actually led anywhere for me and I even saw a stack of resumes in the trash one time which was really discouraging.
Eventually I got a call while I was on vacation from a recruiting agency saying they had some opportunities. They said I had applied but I still have no recollection of visiting their website tbh. I landed a job in software support through them with my current company which is buying me out of the contract this coming month after being there for a little under a year.
I was skeptical at first going into software support since I really wanted to do some coding myself but it has so far worked in my favor. I have had the opportunity to do some coding with some of our engineers and my regular job duties also require code analysis so it is a lot more hands on with code than I first expected. There is also a clear path to becoming a software engineer with my current role so I will be pursuing that.
Overall, if you are comfortable doing something other than software engineering as your main role, I would look for similar roles like devops, db management, or anything that might involve some scripting programming as a smaller responsibility. Then you can try to work your way into software engineering from there. Definitely continue to apply to software engineering positions as your man focus though.
Books and comics I do grab manually, as I haven’t found something that works super well.
However, I have started using Kapowarr for comic management and mass renaming to match the file/folder structure Komga expects. It is still lacking some features but the developer has been making steady progress on it and the only two major features I feel its missing are metadata creation, and torrent indexers. The latter of which should be part of the next version and may boost its ability to automate downloads. I can’t attest to its manga support as I don’t read any, but it grabs its metadata from comicvine so that will likely be the determining factor. The developer also only permits LLM generated code under rather strict rules iirc.
As for ebooks, I grab them from my chosen source and just use the upload button in calibre web automated. I haven’t found an automation tool worth using yet, but I do like to keep an organized library in case I want to revisit something or share it with someone else.