There are many comments to my post... I thank you all so much for taking the time to read it all and provide advice I'll be thinking about for a very long time.

There are many comments to my post... I thank you all so much for taking the time to read it all and provide advice I'll be thinking about for a very long time. I really appreciate it. :) bows I won't reply to everyone but here are the main points I've taken from all the comments. Don't worry so much about money and long term goals because they change easily, working on oneself is important, e.g relationships, skills, confidence and principles. When building a product, don't fret about internals and things on the list of "programmer's best practices"; users only care about what they want. Keep learning and be confident; I'm making progress. Contribute to open source, participate in programming contests and keep meeting new people. Also, keep finding a job, one of these days I'll get one. To answer a couple of people, I study at the University of Sydney and live in the same city. Again, thank you very much. :)