As already stated, do not get into freelancing until you know that 1) you can deliver a project and 2) you have a decent idea of how long it will take to do it.

As already stated, do not get into freelancing until you know that 1) you can deliver a project and 2) you have a decent idea of how long it will take to do it. My advice is to keep your day job, quit reading hacker news all day, and quit staying up all night doing Project Euler. There are a million ideas for building websites, web apps or mobile apps. Pick a platform for now, whichever you're most comfortable with, and build a product. I don't recommend this product necessarily be a startup-type deal - it can be something simple. Easy even. If you like, you can pick something you don't have much experience with and focus on shoring that experience up. Don't know how to work with REST APIs? Build a twitter client. Want to expand that knowledge? Build a dashboard for a random project (like this) that pulls in from Github, Stackoverflow, Twitter and Reddit APIs. If you want to do the world some good, make it so that I can go to a page that looks like that Ember dashboard, type in the name of my project, and get a dashboard out of it. After a few of these, you'll know what you can do, and have an idea for how long it'll take. At that point, you'll also have a code portfolio. Open source the code on Github (free if it's open source). Then come up with something more ambitious. Maybe a two or three week project. Figure out how long you think it'll take. Work on that and track your time diligently. When you're finished (if you finish), you'll know how close your estimation skills are. If the app is worthwhile, it can be a startup. Whatever happens, by this point, you should have a public-facing application that solves a problem, and a couple of utilities or libraries or gems that have gotten you some credibility as a developer, and a code portfolio at the very least. Finding a job at this point shouldn't be terribly hard if that's what you want -- you should at least be able to get a junior level position somewhere within a few months. They may not pay relocation, but anybody that can prove that they can build an application from zero to completion should not have a problem getting a job. You can of course freelance at this stage if you want, but I think it's harder to go all in on while depending on a regular paycheck and clients can be much more demanding than you might have time to fit in on nights and weekends. Regardless, there will be open doors by this stage, and all it will have cost you is your 'screwing around' time. Best of luck, whichever route you choose.