You are never too inexperienced to get started. In fact I think that's probably the greatest obstacle to more people being experts at something, the fear of not

You are never too inexperienced to get started. In fact I think that's probably the greatest obstacle to more people being experts at something, the fear of not being good enough before they even dive in. I also came from a technical background, Mech. and Elec. Eng, and didn't really start programming until about 6.5 years ago. But I was deadly serious about it and about being the best, even if I didn't have a CS degree. I immersed myself. About 2 years ago, I was able to quit engineering and go full-time. Now I run a web development consultancy that has a great team, and I'm writing articles that even get picked up by Ruby Inside (thanks perterc!). I'm even in the process of contributing back to both Rails and jQuery core. I talk to a lot of people looking to dive into software development because they can't find technical cofounders. I think this is the right approach, but they all seem to have this mindset that they'll never be a real programmer, in that they ask me how in the world they can get started and simply not suck. Not sucking is one thing, but being great is where it's at. Do the latter, and you'll always land on your feet.