[AlexMcP]

I was in the same boat. I graduated from a liberal arts college with a degree that no one has ever asked about. After lots of non-profit work after school I was tasked with 'updating the website' one day. Cut to 3 years and $100+ in library fines later and I've been the lead developer on Fortune 50 websites and now work for for a 'rent a Rails shop' company. Here's the advice:

Learn how to interview well. Knowing what github is, having actually launched a site, and wrangling some freelance work together puts you ahead of 90% of the people I worked with at my Big Co. job, you just need to be able to prove it and convince people of it. The competition for most positions consists of bored CS grads from Java schools who never learned how to use version control and for whom programming is just a job. You have passion it appears, and that can't be overrated.

I was willing to be aggressive with my first interview, noting that I would be able to accept a lower-than-market rate if they would do a salary review shortly after I started. Not everyone is in the position to do so, but I took a 'whatever it takes' attitude to get started, with the confidence in myself that once people saw how effective I could be, things would get better. Programming is as close to a meritocratic profession as exists, so get in a position to prove yourself.

[stc]

Thanks for the reply, always nice to hear about liberal arts majors that have walked the road ahead of me. I think I need to improve on the confidence as I feel less sure of myself now than I did six months ago, something of a more you learn less you know scenario. I do have a ton of confidence in my abilities to get a job done however so maybe I should tap that part of my psyche during interviews.

[jchrisa]

I was a Philosophy major (yay Lewis, Kripke and Quine) and didn't really get into programming until I wanted to build websites for my friends. Back then we didn't have jQuery, so I learned PHP.

But I agree with this thread -- keep pushing on JavaScript. CouchApps are a great way to learn front end while having the back end more or less taken care of for you, but most apps are gonna require an extra degree of freedom on the back end. You'll find that your JS skills travel well, especially now that node.js is viable.

If you haven't read this article yet, read it an grok it: http://javascript.crockford.com/remedial.html

If you know this stuff cold, then the only thing standing between you and a well paying developer gig is personal networking and a bigger open-source portfolio. Go to node.js and Couch meetups, they are vibrant welcoming communities that value beginning coders as much as veterans.