@Victor, I'd take into account that Android development is done with Java. This might not be something you're interested in, but if it is, then your decision is a no brainer.

Did I hear it here or in school that .net is pretty much the last thing anyone should be learning these days, as no real serious companies will be using it, typically?

Maybe I'm misremembering and it was another language.

I'm sure there are plenty of serious companies using .net and will be for the future. It has pros and cons. If a company goes with .net they are married to MS. It can make things easier cause you're dealing with a single source for your tech stack. It can also make things harder cause you are locked into one platform and one OS.

A quick googling suggests there are plenty of jobs for both techs, with java having a slight lead. Personally I think java is more future proof but I am biased so take it with a grain of salt.

IntelliJ runs smoother than VS2015 Community and IMO is a superior IDE and most deff the best IDE for Java.

I'm not sure what I think about bootcamps. I don't have enough data to really back me up but my feelings are instead of spending 12k you can pretty easily take that time and that money to go the self taught route.

This is of course coming from a self taught developer who didn't really have any real problems getting my career going after I learned what I needed to learn, made a portfolio site, and made github repos that showed I could do the job. I'd like to think that when I first started looking for work hiring managers looked at my site and github and said "yeah he doesn't have much experience but he can code enough to be worth talking to" and that was good enough to get me in the door. I don't see why a 12k bootcamp would work better than that for that purpose.

Find local community college or university, set up meeting to discuss a path to graduation (including which courses to take and when), stop by the bookstore on your way out and write down all the books used for those classes, buy books off amazon and get basically the same education for 1/12th the price (and know roughly what order to read them in)

i took 2 object oriented classes at the local community college a few years ago. one was broad oop concepts and didnt focus on any language. the other was java.

also took an html/css/javascript class.

i may be slightly underprepared, but im not too worried.

Its unpredictable. In the past Java has been the more Serious Enterprisey choice. However .NET is going open source and multi platform, so that may change. C# is also a much better language, its like someone saw Java and decided to make a version that didnt suck. Its like that because that is in fact what happened.

I struggle with structure and motivation. in the grand scheme, 12k is a drop in the bucket to get my life in order, and get out of this cycle of dead end jobs by learning viable skills and make professional contacts.

yes, all of the resources are out there to succeed on my own, but for 2 years I have hardly scratched the service on getting started and taking advantage of them. ofc, this may be an indication that i do not have sufficient desire, passion, and ability for such a career.

On April 16th 2011 I became highly motivated.

From what I've seen in job listings, .net seems to be used A LOT in government and military applications.

I could be thinking of another language.

Nonsense. Not everyone is motivated by the same things and not everyone learns the same way. Find what works for you and you'll be amazed at the results.

I auto reject all recruiters unless I have emailed/phoned witht them before.

Pretty similar to how I got started - community college classes in Perl, Java and C++. Back when SF City college was $13/credit hour. And the teachers were pretty good.

Old colleague of mine wants me to do a 10 hour/2 day presentation/knowledge dump about front end/process in relation to the enterprise CMS they use that I worked with. Rate? Was thinking $70/hour? $100? I have to burn vacation anyways.

At least 100, plus expenses.

Depends on how much you want to do it.

I'd say minimum of $100/hour - a lot more if you don't really want to do it.

$100/hr definitely minimum, depending on how much value you think you are going to bring and your level of experience 150-200 could be very reasonable.

Enterprise CMS stuff is expensive, and if they wanted 10 hrs of training from the company that makes/ supports the CMS I'm sure it would be much much more expensive.

To put this in perspective, I did some NVMe training. It consisted of like 27 hours of pre-recorded training videos -- so not even live and the company can sell the same thing with no additional investment over and over.

Total bill for just me:

To also put in perspective - $100/hour is probably on the low end of what those employees cost the company.

i would think $150-250/hr, based on what mid- to high-level techs going rates are in the IT world afaik

also,
officially increased my pool of potential new employers by 200% today.

How did you do that Roonil? Please tell

instead of applying to just one place, I applied to two more places

Aww yeaaa thanks for the secret sauce.

Anyways... Hackerrank has a way that you can create your own private contest where you can either create your own questions or add their preexisting challenges. You'll be able to see everyone's progress and there would be a leaderboard. I was thinking maybe we can do our own friendly 2p2 hacker rank contest? If this sounds like a good idea, I'll make another thread. We will then just need to decide on the best time to start.

For an entrepreneurship course in my MBA I'm in a team planning to build a platform bringing together event organisers and service providers (similar to http://www.shaadisaga.com/).

I'd love to build some kind of prototype myself.
I'm an engineer with a very strong affinity for IT and programming, have done some programming myself (java, C, C++, VERY basic HTML) in class (but never something in the 'real' world), and most aspects of coding come natural to me (algorithms, data structures, OO stuff, etc).
On the negative side, I have no experience with ruby on rails or web design, and am not very familiar with everything that surrounds the process of just mashing working code in an editor (working in bigger projects, building efficient / scalable architecture, web hosting, version control, ...).

How realistic is it that I can just use my windows laptop to auto-didact myself towards a somewhat OK looking prototype that more or less works (in a couple of months, and working not even close to fulltime on it)? Any tips on how to tackle this in the most efficient way?