What you should do is pick one stack to work with, and become good at it. It's okay to not like the stack you picked, as long as it's popular. But learning is

What you should do is pick one stack to work with, and become good at it. It's okay to not like the stack you picked, as long as it's popular. But learning is hard, so stick with whatever you picked to the point where you have a mobile app, or a web app on a server with a rest API that your front end code uses. Some stacks you might look at: Have a new Macbook and an Iphone? learning swift and objective C and picking up IOS programming will get you work. Have an Android phone, and any sort of computer that's moderately fast? Learn Java and becoming an Android Developer. But maybe you want to do a web stack. You generally want some experience on the back and and the front end. When in your learning, you don't know what to use out of a bunch of tools, pick what is most widely used, and if it's a tie, go with the older thing, or the simpler thing. You will be learning Javascript, as well as HTML and CSS for the front end dev work, so for the back end Node.js, which is a server side javascript platform, is a good thing to learn. Express is one framework, but it's most popular, and you want to pick up a popular stack. Like Python? Learn Django. If the company you want to work for uses a microframework like Flask or something, they will still probably hire Django devs, but the opposite may not be true. Like Ruby? Ruby on Rails isn't the only framework, but it's super popular, and you want to get the skills, right? Learn to use the command line (Mac, Linux, or cygwin if you have to stay on windows) to do things. Sign up for Amazon's free 1 year of cloud services, so you can practice setting up stuff over ssh and using git. Learn git, enough to be able to put projects up on github, and to get them down onto your server. In terms of front end, learn enough jquery to interact with a REST API and get data from it into your app. Consider a front end framework like angular. Learn bootstrap, which is a CSS framework, because again, its popular. It's not necessary to understand big O or data structures in detail for a startup job, but it might be to get hired. Knowing SQL is probably helpful eventually, but don't worry if you don't. Why do I keep telling you to pick the popular thing? Because startups want people who may not know the stack, but know how to use a stack and accomplish something. You can get hired to do android dev knowing only IOS, or ruby on rails knowing django, or using react and backbone when you know angular. Learning to program is hard. Try to get in an hour or two every day. Once you know how to make something specific in a specific stack, branch out and learn more broadly. Good Luck.