I took a few years off mid-career to try teaching mathematics, but couldn’t make it work. How I got back on the dev track: 1. I picked up any gigs I could fro

I took a few years off mid-career to try teaching mathematics, but couldn’t make it work. How I got back on the dev track: 1. I picked up any gigs I could from craigslist, just to be able to get a recent job from someone who would give me a reference. 2. Then I took any contracting job I could get, again, focusing on getting experience. 3. From there I was able to get a full time job and leverage myself over a couple job hops back to where I would have been had I not left programming for a few years. I think that something similar would work for bootstrapping a programming career out of being a hobby programmer.