I understand the desire to pad your resume with things that didn’t happen if it feels like you don’t get noticed without it, but in the long term that can only lead to trouble.
If someone has 3 years experience in a professional environment, the exposure they have had to issues such as scalability, maintainability, and sheer complexity of codebases would make it pretty difficult to bluff your way through if you did not have that lived experience personally.
You may land some interviews - but how well could you really fare in keeping up the pretence?
You might get an offer - but will your references verify that you did good work with them as a dev for 3 years?
You might get the job…can you really keep up with the expectations of someone with way more experience than you?
To answer your question “What is the best way for no experience self-taught developer to get the first junior to mid level job?”, Randell’s suggestion is solid (you’ll see from my resume below I did a similar thing). The other way is not to rely on resumes at all! Expand your network and use that network to find opportunities that sending out inexperienced resumes will miss.
Here is my actual resume from before I started working as a dev, HOWEVER it was not this resume that landed me a job!
Now, everything on this resume is true. Some of it really stretches the experiences to fit the narrative I was trying to sell, but is all true. I really did write some software in my teaching career - but obviously I was a teacher, not a coder.
The Pairboard stuff was also true. I set up an open source project of my own and managed it - there were lots of freeCodeCamp members from a few years ago involved, and some Chingu cohort members.
Now this wasn’t a professional thing, but we ran it like one. We used CI, we had a good git flow, we code reviewed each other, and had Trello and Slack to keep it all going. It meant I could talk about some of the real issues of working on a team - even if in reality none of us were pros.
But like I said - having that on my resume didn’t matter in the end, because I really got my job by meeting someone at a meetup and impressing them in person. My resume didn’t even get looked at until I was in the second stage of the interview process and by then I was already looking better in person than I did on paper - which is the truth about most inexperienced developers.
I’d also add this excellent article from @asianvader describing the process she went though, going from Zero experience to Professional Developer: