You haven't failed at all. There's nothing wrong with being a generalist. Everybody who is into programming has a bazillion empty and half-finished Git repos with ideas that went nowhere. It shows you have been exploring, experimenting and learning a lot in the process. It may be a bummer that you don't have an official piece of paper to prove it, but any employer willing to look past this will see that you have a lot of potential.
In my opinion specializing in only one skill early in life is only going to limit your possibilities later on in life. Right now it's important that you have broad interests and are able to learn new skills quickly, and to me it sounds like that's exactly the case. College doesn't really fully prepare you for working life anyway; personally I wish I had spent a little less time on college and started my career just a little bit earlier.
Finding that first job is going to be a challenge without a degree but once you find a company willing to take a chance on you, you'll likely find that you have more than enough knowledge to do the job and are flexible enough to adjust yourself to whatever the needs of the company are. Once you've got that first bit of work experience, any missteps you may have made during your college years will simply stop mattering.
Comments
You haven't failed at all. There's nothing wrong with being a generalist. Everybody who is into programming has a bazillion empty and half-finished Git repos with ideas that went nowhere. It shows you have been exploring, experimenting and learning a lot in the process. It may be a bummer that you don't have an official piece of paper to prove it, but any employer willing to look past this will see that you have a lot of potential.
In my opinion specializing in only one skill early in life is only going to limit your possibilities later on in life. Right now it's important that you have broad interests and are able to learn new skills quickly, and to me it sounds like that's exactly the case. College doesn't really fully prepare you for working life anyway; personally I wish I had spent a little less time on college and started my career just a little bit earlier.
Finding that first job is going to be a challenge without a degree but once you find a company willing to take a chance on you, you'll likely find that you have more than enough knowledge to do the job and are flexible enough to adjust yourself to whatever the needs of the company are. Once you've got that first bit of work experience, any missteps you may have made during your college years will simply stop mattering.