I taught myself. Started in 2008 with PHP/HTML/CSS for a friends existing website, initially unpaid and for fun, but it rapidly became paid and brought substan

I taught myself. Started in 2008 with PHP/HTML/CSS for a friends existing website, initially unpaid and for fun, but it rapidly became paid and brought substantial income (within a month or two) because I streamlined and automated things that were being done manually. Tempting to call that an exception but if you create real business value that fast, get paid for it or at the least get a glowing recommendation out of it. In 2009 I started learning Python, Objective-C, and C for fun, making things I needed myself. High level and low level stuff at the same time. A simple automated website "ping" checker for App Engine called AEServmon[1] I wrote for my own use was probably the first thing I ever open sourced. I also hacked together some C in Cardrand[2], again for personal use, to take advantage of the random number generator present in most smart cards to feed the Linux kernel pool (/dev/random etc) with entropy. By 2010 I was fairly proficient in Objective-C and C, very familiar with UIKit and AppKit, started selling Mi-Fi Monitor[3][4], then later on Codepoints[5]. In 2011 I started doing consulting work on OS X and iOS projects. If I set aside the initial PHP success, I'd say roughly 1.5 years between "day 1" and selling products, and about 3 years before feeling confident in taking on fairly significant projects for clients. As an aside, Mi-Fi Monitor got me a phone call from an executive at Novatel (they made the original Mi-Fi hotspots), some discussions about rebranding it or working together, and several "good job" type emails from a few of the other execs there. They were paying attention, and actually using the app themselves. [1] https://github.com/infincia/AEServmon https://github.com/infincia/AEServmon [2] https://github.com/infincia/Cardrand https://github.com/infincia/Cardrand [3] http://infincia.com/apps/mi-fi-monitor-ios http://infincia.com/apps/mi-fi-monitor-ios [4] http://infincia.com/apps/mi-fi-monitor-mac http://infincia.com/apps/mi-fi-monitor-mac [5] http://infincia.com/apps/codepoints http://infincia.com/apps/codepoints