Your never too old to join a start up. Want to give yourself an edge above the competition go to Amazon and purchase current physical books on Ruby on Rails, J

Your never too old to join a start up. Want to give yourself an edge above the competition go to Amazon and purchase current physical books on Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML5 CSS3, etc. that you have an interest in. PDFs/EPUBs and other digital content is nice but those physical books and their size will help remind you that you have some serious work to do. As your start to finish each book faster and faster you will have actual produced work you can use for your personal resume that you have created and customized from your newly learned skills. When you have mastered what was in those books you can look back at the thousands and thousands of pages and go wow I know all that by heart, oh man how far I have come. Bootcamps are a nice general overview but will not take you to the level of mastery that you will get from books created by experts in their field. You may even get a book or few from a master in their field (David Heinemeier Hannson for Ruby on RAILS, Dennis Ritchie for C, Bjarne Stroustrup for C++, Brendan Eich for JavaScript, John Resig for jQuery, etc.). If you don't want the average Joe Nobody job you have to put in the work to gain mastery of your craft. Don't worry about the money it will come the closer you get to mastery as your skills will be extremely sought after by those wanting ( and needing ) your help and services solving unsolved real world business/technical problems. You do have to start somewhere; that can be working for someone or working for yourself (recommend end game). All that marketing and business skills you put all that time into learning comes in very helpful in a business, especially those that want to market their products and services. Nothing better than someone with experience in those business units but also knows technology. I would recommend working on product development while working through your road to learning. If you can build a few production quality products and have active users engaging in them that will skyrocket your chances with joining a start up. Who knows one might just reach out to you, without you having to try and find them. Your confidence in your abilities seem to be low at this current point but that will fade away as time goes on as you start to master certain aspects of the languages. Key here is you want to insure that you have something excellent to offer to anyone that you are trying to be employed by or if you are going to start a business and work for yourself. Think of a start up as your first business client, what mastered skills, qualities and services can you offer them to make them and yourself better.