I have long been interested in programming, but became passionate about it a
couple years ago. I am determined to make it my full-time job.<p>I would like advice on the following:<p>How to:<p>become goal-oriented?<p>differentiate myself from "boot-campers/coders" on job applications?<p>What should my portfolio look like? Now just some ragtag projects and one-off
scripting solutions. I have some big ideas, but having trouble committing.<p>A little background:<p>I was working studiously toward becoming a web developer until I got spooked by
job data and the AI hype this past March, pivoted to ML, hated it, worked
through a C textbook, considered embedded/hardware but think it's probably
out-of-reach/unrealistic goal, so I'm back to Rails.<p>I have a degree from a good university, but:<p>it is a philosophy degree<p>I graduated with a 2.6 GPA, so grad school feels out-of-reach<p>I have a family, so not tons of extracurricular time. Luckily, my job is so
easy that I only work for a few hours per week.<p>I have a senior role in a mid-sized human services nonprofit's accounting
department<p>My boss doesn't understand tech at all<p>desk calculator, paper and pen preferred over excel sheet<p>the most advanced thing they can do is create a pivot table. They have no
idea how to manipulate it aside from adding fields and displaying
aggregated sums.<p>The tech situation is abysmal:<p>Use an ERP (GP 2018) that is in extended support<p>hundreds of excel workbooks spread across numerous network drives on an
in-house server that frequently fails<p>an IT department that is beyond useless--they tend to break things
whenever they attempt a fix for any problem that goes beyond turning it
off and back on again.<p>The company pays >$110k a year for this<p>I have pointed out its failures but have been rebuffed by management<p>two shitty web apps. I truly think I could build one of them better
myself.<p>I requested a role change to db admin/software developer, but was denied and
given a senior role in current dept instead.<p>There is zero demand for tech solutions--everything just "works" (albeit
with tons of extra effort on the part of the hard-headed and huge amounts of
waste)<p>even if there were, I feel that implementing said solutions would be near
impossible given the incompetency of the aforementioned IT dept<p>Related skills:<p>Languages/frameworks<p>Solid on Ruby (actively learning Rails), Python, C, SQL, Power Query/BI<p>Some JS, Visual Basic, CSS, HTML<p>Intrigued by Go, Haskell, Scala<p>Concepts<p>basic:<p>DSA (BST, hash maps, linked lists, graphs, b-trees)<p>ML (eg completed, Google's crash course, some intermediate Kaggle courses)<p>Computer architecture<p>Unix<p>solid on databases and non-cloud web technology<p>no knowledge of containerization tools, but understand they are important<p>Soft<p>Good:<p>Communication<p>Technical writing<p>Teaching/training<p>Creative<p>Problem solving<p>Always meet deadlines<p>Poor:<p>Network<p>Learning pace (obsessive/perfectionist tendencies, go down rabbit holes)<p>Difficult to be nice to people who clearly aren't even trying and
constantly ask for help, or are just plain incompetent<p>Long-term planning/project management<p>I see a lot of talk about boot-campers who are in it for a quick buck. Although
my passion was sparked by <https://www.theodinproject.com> (web dev), I do not
consider myself to fall into this category: I literally dream about programming
most nights. I wake up at 4 AM and can't go back to sleep because I am too
excited to get back to work. I think computers are the closest thing to magic
that I'll ever see.