Some of the coding bootcamps have pretty detailed curriculum including intermediate and capstone projects. If somebody puts up useful mini-app backends in Rails or Django and shows they can unit test, branch/merge in git, do basic config/admin on linux db/solr/elastic/web etc servers, that should be a pretty employable. Or data sciency: spider and assemble clean datasets.<p>Look at meetups, there's fair number intros to python, R, rails, go, C# etc sessions in any decently sized city.<p>This is asking a lot, it might take 18 months, or a lot longer than those bootcamps. That's ok, it's like learning Mandarin or violin or the first couple years of college applied math, just take small steps, the simplest things that could adequately work.<p>Lists of basic skills: Uncle Bob Martin's book,<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12829561" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12829561</a><p><a href="http://web.archive.org/web/20150417115543/http://samizdat.mines.edu/howto/HowToBeAProgrammer.html" rel="nofollow">http://web.archive.org/web/20150417115543/http://samizdat.mi...</a>?