My career has progressed over the years as I learned about opportunities in the tech world.
I first started out in HTML web and email design, but I found it to be too difficult to make it into anything more than beer money.
After talking to other people in the industry, I started making websites in simple PHP. Eventually I migrated to WordPress and spent a few years building my LAMP stack skills. WP and PHP becomes a nightmare for any large project, and I found myself getting burned and burnt out by clients and PHP issues.
Along the way, I picked up JS and got good enough to pass interviews. This led to a one year gig as part of a marketing team, cranking out code and dealing with non-technicals ruining projects.
The JS frameworks started exploding, and I found work as an AngularJS (1.x) dev. This got me into corporate work. I got exposed to more tech and my resume blew up.
Nowadays, I work in React and NodeJS but my experience gets me jobs across all of the stacks I dabbled in.
My recommendation is to get a job, learn all you can, coast. Then use some of your free time to educate yourself for your next job. Get more skills, rinse, repeat.
