Here's the story: I'm 33, American, have significant experience abroad (and possessing the attendant linguistic/cultural skills), and have nearly 10 years of project and product management experience, mostly in consumer-facing mobile and web services.
I've been in love with software since typing out verbatim code from the back of Contact magazine and then playing around with it as a kid in the late 80s, and I've walked the basic Pascal -> C -> C++ -> Java -> various web scripting language pathway of late 90s/early 2000 computer science education.
Over the last ten years I've kept myself reasonably sharp, and have spent time picking up Ruby and Clojure and Scala, but never as a day job. Increasingly, though, I realize that what I'm doing as a hobby is what I really enjoy, and I want to make the jump into a position where I can write code as my primary job, but I'm finding that the first step is harder than I imagined it would be.
So, any advice?
* Should I market myself on the PM skills that I have as "a competent developer with benefits," or should I focus on the technical skills I have and try to wow someone into taking a chance on me?
* Should I pick a language / architecture (realistically for me right now it would be Ruby or a JVM-based language, probably Clojure) and really dive deep, or do my generalist roots help more than hurt?
* Any experiences making a move like this that someone would be willing to share?
I've been in love with software since typing out verbatim code from the back of Contact magazine and then playing around with it as a kid in the late 80s, and I've walked the basic Pascal -> C -> C++ -> Java -> various web scripting language pathway of late 90s/early 2000 computer science education.
Over the last ten years I've kept myself reasonably sharp, and have spent time picking up Ruby and Clojure and Scala, but never as a day job. Increasingly, though, I realize that what I'm doing as a hobby is what I really enjoy, and I want to make the jump into a position where I can write code as my primary job, but I'm finding that the first step is harder than I imagined it would be.
So, any advice?
* Should I market myself on the PM skills that I have as "a competent developer with benefits," or should I focus on the technical skills I have and try to wow someone into taking a chance on me?
* Should I pick a language / architecture (realistically for me right now it would be Ruby or a JVM-based language, probably Clojure) and really dive deep, or do my generalist roots help more than hurt?
* Any experiences making a move like this that someone would be willing to share?