I was a Fortran developer for a few years in the Aerospace business. After a while, I got sick of 1977 and just wanted to be a "regular" full stack guy. At th

I was a Fortran developer for a few years in the Aerospace business. After a while, I got sick of 1977 and just wanted to be a "regular" full stack guy. At the time Rails 2.X was current and Clojure was pretty new. Both looked pretty neat. I learned Rails and Clojure on my free time, went through Michael Hartl's Twitter knockoff to learn, and applied for jobs. Nobody really loved how little I knew about modern web dev, but several told me they could see I was bright-ish and sufficiently motivated that they'd take the chance. It was hard and stressful at first, because I didn't know anything (JavaScript, jQuery, what's a "callback" function?, etc.) but I picked it up fairly quickly. Made $80K my first year (pretty good junior dev salary in Texas) and it's been better every year since.