Just came across this, thank you. Self teaching myself now and constantly worrying about having x number of pages/apps going to show I know what I'm doing.
Never give up. Start learning the languages you want to work with. The resources are out there and the community is more than supportive.
I'm 31 and just started to learn, I do get a little frustrated at times, but ultimately I know I'm good enough to get to the level of getting hired somewhere. The more you work on little side projects and ask questions, the more you realize that it is within reach.
When I was in grad school, I was 21, most of my colleagues were 30 and a couple in their 40s, who wanted to be professors. Just go after what you want and have fun while doing it.
Just some random thoughts I've been working/wish I had more time to do:
I would a lot of my time just working and maintaining an app to write and categorize recipes I have at home. This would go hand in hand with just taking on more involved and elaborate cooking projects (ramen, making moles, smoked meats).
I would also just work on random ruby challenges all the time. Some cryptography stuff, some math or general programming challenges, but also just programs I can use. Something fun would be to make a really nice music player/manager using shoes, just for the fun of it. I like music programs that run natively in Linux versus just web players. Other than this just learn as much as I can by contributing to open source projects.
A BIG goal of mine would also be work towards being a polyglot. I studied linguistics and other languages in college, and every programming language I seem to come across just sees fascinating to me. I want to absorb these and just become very familiar with things like Go and Haskell, two of which of are particular interest.
Other than that, I want to work on my fitness. Jogging more, going to the gym during the day when it's not as busy, stuff like that. I also have various games I want to play, not so much projects but just for fun.
I would love to check out the Punch Ball version. The original Mario Bros. game was very fun to me. It was so simple looking yet the gameplay was great and I found myself challenging friends all the time.
I'm also a fan of the Donkey Kong games where you have to jump across platforms and use trampolines, I have to find a way to check these out!
If you're saying programmer I'm assuming there is already this level of experience, but I went ahead and made my own blog set up. This was mostly really to learn Rails. Even though I am mostly doing strictly Ruby stuff at the moment, I hear of or see features I want to add to the blog so little by little I pick up more rails techniques.
For just having something already set to focus on your writing, I really like what I've seen from Jekyll, I don't have a need yet but I'm definitely keeping it in mind for future projects.
I'm going to be 32 and have recently started teaching myself Ruby/Rails in the past couple of months. I get it, one of the biggest insecurities I have is wondering if I'm too old to get the job I want.
Like you, I obsess over the things I've been learning and finding that this is bigger passion than many things I've done in the past.
Just keep learning and keep working on things. It will happen eventually. I have much more to learn but I am just learning now that I need to stop worrying about an age and just go fort he job that I want because it will happen.
good to know, a bit of the insecurity I've had comes from seeing people who have been doing some of things since what seems like forever. Good to know there is still hope!
I am currently teaching myself while working full time in a non tech related career. May I ask how old you are? This is very encouraging. I'm currently Hartl's tutorial and CodeSchool, so hopefully I'm on the right track.
I'm in the same boat, currently teaching myself ruby/rails during lunch breaks from my job in the hopes of finding a better one.
What I use personally is a Chromebook. Yes, it is Chrome OS, but I've been doing all of my tutorials and basic apps this way and I really enjoy it.
You will need to look into Crouton which establishes a chroot of a Linux environment: https://github.com/dnschneid/crouton. Once you have this all set up, you can just run the Linux environment as a shell prompt. This allows you to use a text editor such as Caret (great free sublime clone that works as an extension), and test your app locally on ChromeOS.
For example, within the chrome tab that includes my Linux terminal, I can run 'rails new sampleapp', then 'rails s' and open up localhost:3000 where my local rails app displays. I can modify the project directory in caret and push to git using again the Linux terminal. Sorry if I rambled on, I just really enjoy that setup on a $200 laptop.