[angelasmith]

I've had a somewhat similar path to you in that I had no development experience, yet after a year I'm now developing at a startup.

As mentioned, I think that the best route for freelancing would be to start with Wordpress development. I say "best" in that there is consistent demand for websites and these are projects that are great to learn on. You could definitely start freelancing right now and charge $35 p/h. Just bill for 1/3 of your time as a previous poster mentioned & learn on the job - this is the most efficient way.

In your spare time (if any), I would highly recommend learning Javascript. Not Jquery - core Javascript. This will be incredibly useful when you do want to go to a startup. You will most likely be positioned as a front-end dev anyway, so focus on that. I have had to learn angularJS on the job and it's been incredibly rewarding, yet I do wish that I had learned serious JS earlier (rather than just rolling WP themes). Once you've got JS relatively down, move to Ruby & Rails.

Enjoy!