long version: I’m a high school calculus/engineering teacher in Fort Worth, TX; 2 years ago I took the Udacity webdev course hoping to learn how to build apps that would be useful for me. Since then I’ve deployed various webapps (maybe 20?) that have been incredibly valuable to me as a teacher and my campus; some are even being used by 100+ other teachers I’ve never met.
The problem is: I now love programming and web development and want to do it full time.
Almost all of my experience is on webapp2 + Jinja2 (an artifact of the Udacity course) + bootstrap and I know that I need to learn Django, which I’ve started to work through. My current tasks are: learn more about test driven development (something I wish Udacity taught on day 1) and work through implementing solutions to the problems in “Programming Interviews Exposed” (an awesome book).
But am I really ready? Up to this point I’ve learned things when I needed to: Need to take in money -> learn Stripe; need to make it faster -> learn knockout; can’t stand all this code just for memcache -> move over to NDB; my brother laughs because my code has no unittests -> learn what the heck is a unittest; add unittests, etc.; but I don’t really know what core competencies companies expect out of new developers.
My question is: knowing that I have a couple months to pick up a few more skills/competencies, what would you recommend that I spend my time on, to maximize my hire-ability?
Thanks in advance!