Hey, I'm also a self-taught developer and was hired as a junior alongside another self-taught developer, who taught himself in the space of 6 months after being a chef for his entire career. He smoked me! I had been programming for 5 years at that point. What was the difference between us?

After working with him for a year, I still didn't know and I still don't know. I offer this to you because, you will not always be better than the people around you.

That being said, its worth investigating the python debugger if you haven't already. import pdb; pdb.set_trace() - this will drop you into a debugger at the spot in execution that will allow you to examine variables and iterate through for loops. This has previously helped with my understanding of Python.

But, my big message to you is to not get taught up on comparing yourself to other devs. You will excel on some things and not be great on others. You will be slower than some and faster than some. Try first of all not to stress about your performance, but keep a learning mindset. From my perspective you seem to have your heart in the right place!!!