"Build it and it will come." That was my strategy. I had no career and a degree in Philosophy that was taking me nowhere. Out of the blue I jumped into Web deve

"Build it and it will come." That was my strategy. I had no career and a degree in Philosophy that was taking me nowhere. Out of the blue I jumped into Web development and started building websites for anybody that needed them, for free. Once I had a portfolio of 10 or so I got a few part time position doing web development at a university. This gave me more experience and at the same time I started hacking on more technical aspects like OO PHP, Mysql, Ruby on Rails etc. I hacked on a few things and had some examples to show. This led to one fulltime job doing mostly PHP. I then hacked a bit more with Ruby and landed another job doing that fulltime. Now I am hacking on IOS and Macruby hoping to make a jump into the fields. See the pattern? Get a development job doing whatever you can. Hack on stuff, build it, then try to move up. Key is, Web Based software, IMO, is a show and tell type profession. Like carpentry the emphasis is on what you can do, what projects you have built, rather then degrees, age etc ...hope that helps...