Ask HN: Am I ready to be a Python developer?

You have the will and the ability to learn on your own. That's one necessity out of the way. You will confront things you don't know about every day. There is no reason to load up on them before you actually need them. Once you have the foundation taken care of (Python) then you can learn the rest on the job.

From here, it's basically all marketing. You need to learn how to sell yourself. First stop, start collecting feedback as soon as possible. If you are looking for a job, then start applying right now. You will start to learn a lot from the responses you get back. If you are looking for freelance work, then start hustling up some clients.

While you are looking, start doing whatever you can through social channels. Get on Github and find some interesting projects that you can contribute to. A perfect fit would be to find a company you would like to work for which happens to have an open source project on Github that you can contribute to. Locate the Twitter, Google+, Facebook, LinkedIn and other accounts of other Python developers. Use that to find out other places these guys hang out. Look for IRC hangouts as well as forums and other communities where you can get in touch with people. Build your weakly linked networks. Get known. Make a bit of noise. As people get to know you then they will think about you when they are looking to hire someone.

Other things you can jump into? Javascript, CSS, HTML. Check out things like Parse, Firebase and similar and build applications which don't even require back-end code (or very minimal.)

That's great that you have released apps that other people use. That's a lot more than a lot of other developers ever do. You are better than you think you are. Now is the time.

Don't look at it this way. You can never be <xyz> by <date>. You just get started. The question to ask will be "Will someone hire me to do web dev work if I can present abc skills and blah experience/portfolio ?". Something like that. Don't wory about June/July whatever.

- What python specific technologies have you learned ? You say webapp2+Jinja2 whch is a great start. Take a look at other popular frameworks (Django,Flask etc). I personally recommend Flask. It is a good balance in my opinion between too much abstraction (Django) vs nothing (barebone WSGI) to pick up python web development.

- Do you/Are you building a portfolio to show your work ? Github etc ? The best thing to do is to build sample apps and show people.

Things like these will help.

- Look for local job openings on non-crappy job sites for Python web developers.

- Do some napkin statistics gathering on who's looking for what, and how many outfits are looking for what (eg. what are people looking for in your area? Django? Flask? Google App Engine? Learn the top of the list.

- Bone up on HTML/CSS/JS/jQuery, how WSGI works, and more Django.

- Come June, apply for jobs. Don't undersell yourself. Bust your ass on-the-job to prove yourself.

Good luck and keep us updated. I am contemplating a similarly-risky move and I have nothing but respect for you and confidence that you'll succeed. You certainly sound like you have your stuff in order.

1 I wouldn't hire you as a consultant because you have no industry experience. Mom and pop shops might, though, but I suspect you wouldn't be able to live off of it full-time.

If you are looking for a suggestion on what to learn next, it will be test-driven development. If you get this right (and because you've built 20+ apps, it won't even take a month), you should be employable by April.

The biggest misconception people without developer jobs have is that the non-dev-job guys assume that the dev guys have every skill memorized and mastered to the tee.

Truth is that most of them are learning as they go like you are. New technologies come out too fast for anyone to truly master anything these days (eg. AngularJS frontend Ninja with 5+ years exp == that company is balls, move on).

Good luck.