Ask HN: Passionate bootcamper without a degree seeking advice
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.
I would like advice on the following:
How to:
become goal-oriented?
differentiate myself from "boot-campers/coders" on job applications?
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.
A little background:
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.
I have a degree from a good university, but:
it is a philosophy degree
I graduated with a 2.6 GPA, so grad school feels out-of-reach
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.
I have a senior role in a mid-sized human services nonprofit's accounting department
My boss doesn't understand tech at all
desk calculator, paper and pen preferred over excel sheet
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.
The tech situation is abysmal:
Use an ERP (GP 2018) that is in extended support
hundreds of excel workbooks spread across numerous network drives on an in-house server that frequently fails
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.
The company pays >$110k a year for this
I have pointed out its failures but have been rebuffed by management
two shitty web apps. I truly think I could build one of them better myself.
I requested a role change to db admin/software developer, but was denied and given a senior role in current dept instead.
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)
even if there were, I feel that implementing said solutions would be near impossible given the incompetency of the aforementioned IT dept
Related skills:
Languages/frameworks
Solid on Ruby (actively learning Rails), Python, C, SQL, Power Query/BI
Some JS, Visual Basic, CSS, HTML
Intrigued by Go, Haskell, Scala
Concepts
basic:
DSA (BST, hash maps, linked lists, graphs, b-trees)
ML (eg completed, Google's crash course, some intermediate Kaggle courses)
Computer architecture
Unix
solid on databases and non-cloud web technology
no knowledge of containerization tools, but understand they are important
Soft
Good:
Communication
Technical writing
Teaching/training
Creative
Problem solving
Always meet deadlines
Poor:
Network
Learning pace (obsessive/perfectionist tendencies, go down rabbit holes)
Difficult to be nice to people who clearly aren't even trying and constantly ask for help, or are just plain incompetent
Long-term planning/project management
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.