I also went through this a few years ago. I was a land surveyor and although I loved the combination of technical, mathematical, and analytic skill with working in the great outdoors, the subprime mortgage crisis resulted in big commercial land development contracts drying up.
You have to be single-minded and goal-oriented. Another HN user above says to "pick a technology stack" and focus down on it. That's great advice. I already had some experience on the LAMP stack and I built up from there. Don't let yourself get distracted after you've decided the direction you see yourself moving in.
Work on side projects. Go to meetups. Find people you can collaborate with and work well with you. See if you can get some PT work that is being parceled out by companies because their own FT devs are too busy. If you're allowed to expose your code, build up your Github. Don't forget to visualise where you see yourself going, and don't be afraid to tell people where you're headed.
Also, make productivity apps work for you. Have a Dropbox file where you keep all your technical books, and have that file open all the time. Subscribe to Pinboard or some other bookmarking service to save technical blog posts and documentation you want to read. Use Trello to manage your projects. Etc. Good luck to you.
You have to be single-minded and goal-oriented. Another HN user above says to "pick a technology stack" and focus down on it. That's great advice. I already had some experience on the LAMP stack and I built up from there. Don't let yourself get distracted after you've decided the direction you see yourself moving in.
Work on side projects. Go to meetups. Find people you can collaborate with and work well with you. See if you can get some PT work that is being parceled out by companies because their own FT devs are too busy. If you're allowed to expose your code, build up your Github. Don't forget to visualise where you see yourself going, and don't be afraid to tell people where you're headed.
Also, make productivity apps work for you. Have a Dropbox file where you keep all your technical books, and have that file open all the time. Subscribe to Pinboard or some other bookmarking service to save technical blog posts and documentation you want to read. Use Trello to manage your projects. Etc. Good luck to you.