[bartonfink]

My day job is with a defense contractor doing service integration for a surveillance system. This is cool, and highly stable (good for the kid), but probably not amenable as experience for part-time work. The night job I was doing for a while was for a company in Denver (my home) on an iPhone app they were writing as a prototype demonstration for their database sharding product dbShards. This was much cooler, but as I said above, not really an option going forward.

Paid work has been primarily in Java, with a fair bit of AJAX development for interfaces. Most work in my M.S. was in C++, but this hasn't gotten much traction from employers. I've done a handful of scripts and under-the-radar one-offs in Python, but nothing anyone would call an application. I try to believe in the idea that a competent developer should be able to learn any tool necessary, but an M.S. doesn't demonstrate learning ability or technical skill to most H.R. departments the way 10 years experience with HP printers does.

[percept]

As suggested above, you'll need something to show prospective clients. This can be challenging when most of your work isn't publicly available, which necessitates building some portfolio pieces for show-and-tell.

For UI-capable developers this would be Web apps/sites, for systems-oriented programmers this could be libraries or utilities.

Also, can you use the business owner you mentioned as a reference (worst he can do is say "no")?