You're definitely on the right track. Honestly if I was still hiring I would contact you.... passion and 'get up and go' go a long way. I'm a newbie and also d

You're definitely on the right track. Honestly if I was still hiring I would contact you.... passion and 'get up and go' go a long way. I'm a newbie and also don't have a CS degree. I just recently exited my startup and just started job hunting for a front end engineering position. Tips from my limited experience: * Make a great *casual* LinkedIn profile that states how you're passionate about web development and how you value creating maintainable scalable code (assuming you do of course). Having it stick out helps get past the recruiters. * Study some softball questions about php/ruby that you'll bound to run into, but don't spend too much time on it. * Google engineer interviewing questions... as stupid as some of them are it might help to at least get a feel for them. * Build lots of apps... even if they are never public. One of my weaknesses was not being able to quickly build X,Y,Z in the 2nd interviews. * Just write a *short* email to the CEO/CTO and/or head engineers where you want to work, you'd be surprised how many get back to you and at least give you a chance to prove yourself.