enduu

For the better part of the last 2 years I've been freelancing part-time as a Wordpress developer, focused mainly on building custom themes and modifying existing plugins. Naturally, this meant PHP was the thing to learn, since I was already familiar with HTML/CSS, and 99% of the time, a bit of jQuery on the side was just enough to get the job done. However, after taking a break for a couple of months in order to focus solely on school, I've realised something pretty scary: I actually suck at programming. What I mean by this, is not that I can't code ( I've pretty much learned programming by myself and am passionate about it ), but the fact that this entire time I've been half-assing it, and now I find myself in a place where I'm not really good at anything. I mean, I know a little bit of C that I picked up in school ( although no OOP ), enough PHP in order to be able to write simple functions that hook into Wordpress, a little bit of Ruby I picked up while building a Rails app, and although I am pretty good with HTML/CSS I'm definitely not up to date with the latest technologies.

So now, after graduating high school and making the decision to get into full-time freelancing, I'm faced with the following dilemma: What would be the the best thing to learn next? I am interested in web development ( although it's not excluded I'm going to learn iOS dev. too sometime in the future ), and after a lot of research I still have no idea what's the right way to go. Foe example, I know I could get serious about learning Rails ( or Django, for that matter ), but then from what I've been reading more recently, javascript ( and javascript-based MVC frameworks ) are the next big thing, and that's what I should focus on.

I know this is a pretty subjective matter, but I'm hoping there are some general guidelines which will help me make the best decision. Thank you!

Hey HN,

This may get asked a lot around here and I know some of you guys are probably sick of answering questions like this, but as I still can't make up my mind and will have to make a decision pretty soon, I thought asking you guys would be my best shot at gaining valuable advice from people who actually work in the industry.

Basically I'm in my last year of high school, and for the last 2 years I have been working as a freelance web designer / front-end web developer. I still don't know what I want to do in the future full-time, because although programming comes to me more naturally, I enjoy designing stuff a lot ( and I'm actually not rubbish at it ). On top of this, I have realised that my goal is to eventually step away from client work and develop my own products / become an entrepreneur

At the moment I'm considering university, but I'm 99% sure it's not going to help me a lot in the future since I learn programming better on my own ( and on top of that, a CS degree might not make that much sense since I want to become a developer and not an engineer ), and most business degrees are rubbish ( many people such as Paul Graham have said that basically entrepreneurship is something you learn as you go ), so that leaves me with design courses ( my main interest would be interactive design, so again, not sure how much a typical graphic design degree would help me ).

Despite all this, my plan is to choose a design course ( by the way, I'm from Eastern Europe, not US ) which isn't that intensive and would allow me to work a lot on my ideas in the free time, while still having the perks of college: a lot of fun, making connections, parties, etc.

Is this a good idea, or am I going about this the wrong way? Could a degree actually make sense, should I continue freelancing or should I just pack my bags and move to Sillicon Valley? What's the best thing to do under these circumstances?

Thanks HN, I'm really looking forward to your answers.