I'll speak from the perspective of a "former developer turned entrepreneur who now hires developers." A degree may help getting your foot in the door of large

I'll speak from the perspective of a "former developer turned entrepreneur who now hires developers." A degree may help getting your foot in the door of large corporations and on the desk of recruiting agencies, but startups are going to look at your demonstrated experience first. So while a degree will give you an edge in some cases, it's not necessary for getting a job. Demonstrable experience is. Now how do you demonstrate this experience without a degree? Open source projects is one great way. Building some of your own apps and publishing them online is another. Having a blog and talking about programming topics is another, though that may invite more scrutiny than you want at this stage in your career. As for which open source projects with which to contribute - I think others here may be better able to answer that. My input would be: Which open source projects excite you? If you're going to contribute to an open source project, pick one that personally excites you. Otherwise, your interest will fizzle out in time. Someone who's made substantial contributions over a meaningful duration of time because he/she really cares about the project is more impressive than someone who's contributing to multiple projects just for the sake of contributing (not that there's anything wrong with that). As for languages, that could depend on what you like. I'm partial to LAMP and C/C++. I see a lot of chatter about Python and Ruby. Some love J2EE. Some love ASP.NET (though it doesn't have as much support in the Silicon Valley area as in the rest of the US). If you like C and Python, continue with those first - get better at them - then graduate yourself to C++ and other languages. I hope this helps. Good luck.