bleakcabal

I got my first job as a .Net programmer doing line of business applications. Nine years later, I have been doing this ever since (at different jobs).

I would like to make a switch to something else (different language, different type of application, different type of organization, something non Microsoft related) but feel I am stuck in a silo career wise.

While I have acquired experience with other languages (ie: Ruby) and tools on my own or on small open-source projects and on personal projects, specific job postings require strong skills simultaneously in many frameworks or tools I do not have experience with.

I recently applied to one such job and got a rejection email before even getting an interview.

I have a job, a family with kids and a house so my time is limited.

There seems to be many options I could pursue; open source contributions, personal projects, online training, professional certifications, bootcamps, hackathons, blog, freelancing work and so on.

I was wondering what is my best bet? What would be the best path for me to make this switch career-wise?

I am making a web-site to propose GitHub projects to people looking to start contribution to projects. I am still in the beginning stages and I am looking for suggestions on how to improve the results. To do this I would like to know what people look for when they are searching for an open source project to contribute to?

For reference here is the site: http://gilles-leblanc.github.io/dispatcher/ And here is the GitHub page: https://github.com/gilles-leblanc/dispatcher