I was a philosophy major scheduled to graduate in May 2013, so I have some relevant experience. When I left Hamilton in Feb. 2012, I had only 3 classes under my

I was a philosophy major scheduled to graduate in May 2013, so I have some relevant experience. When I left Hamilton in Feb. 2012, I had only 3 classes under my belt and less programming experience than you do now. As an engineer at a large company and now at a start-up, here's what I can tell you. 1) When people ask what I do, I tell them I am a philosopher and a typist[1]. It sounds like a joke, but I'm serious. Most of programming can be broken out between solving the problem and then typing it out (syntax, semantics, style.) For the 'solving the problem' piece, you've been trained to solve abstract problems, to logically work your way towards a holistic, pragmatic solution. Don't underestimate that. I reference Wittgenstein and Berlin when writing API documentation. I look to Plato to decouple architecture and encourage sane data-modeling. You have one hell of an advantage. Computer science has been around for 60 years; you're leveraging the wisdom of thousands of years of accumulated problem solving. 2) Do it. You can spend your tuition on learning at a hacker school, but nothing will prepare you like building it yourself. Build yourself a website. It can start by being static with HTML and CSS. Then merge that into a framework (Rails/Django) deployed on Heroku. Then provision your own VPS and deploy it there. You can over-engineer the hell out of a simple website. For a job, never do this. For your personal projects, go apeshit. You need to learn fast. Not all of the implementation details of every technology, but the mental models. The largest blocker for you right now is that you don't know what to Google. You're smart enough to solve any problem, but you don't yet have the experience to accurately frame them. I would recommend working as an intern to learn the basics. Get familiar with the problems. If you have any questions, I'd love to talk more. Shoot me an email at chris at zenpayroll dot com. (1) http://twitter.com/comaddox http://twitter.com/comaddox