[jmsbrwr]

How did you pick your specialty? I've toyed with the idea of freelancing, but I have no idea what my niche would be. I don't have any professional experience, so I suppose that makes the decision a bit more difficult, but only because it adds so many options.

[agibsonccc]

You'll laugh at the story. 2nd year of college I created a spider for the first time and loved the idea of a computer being autonomous. Took some classes, took it up as a hobby and it became a profession.

Other than that, I asked a lot of questions, read papers in different areas to find what was interesting. (Not necessarily understanding ALL of the math behind it immediately, but enough to get an overview of what the intended functionality was supposed to accomplish.)

It took a long time to get to a level to where I could do it professionally, so I started out with a web dev background, went through an incubator to learn how a business works and started taking more specialized work. Lots of it was in distributed messaging/finance and I went from there.

My best advice is to experiment with different areas. I'm not talking about your typical socket.io/long polling app written in node either.

Don't be afraid to step outside your comfort zone. Computer vision or even graphics programming with Web GL aren't so hard you can never do them if you just step enough in to an area such that you get a feeling for whether you enjoy it or not.

I might add that what you enjoy might not be super complex, but I would say take time to understand different areas (it might be making CRUD apps for a certain industry) enough to understand what work would be like in the field and work from there.

[jmsbrwr]

You'll laugh at home close to home you hit.

I am just finishing up an HTML5 anonymous IRC client that I originally planned on using Socket.io for. I decided to use Firebase in the end.

Also, I think the Oculus Rift is one of the coolest inventions I've seen in a long time because it takes an industry that has a pretty consistent history (video games) and turned it on it's head. Oculus VR is taking what most people believe to be science fiction and making it a reality. I have a lot of respect for those guys. (And I might have sent them a job application last week. ;)) Computer vision/graphics is an interesting field that thrives because of the type of math I enjoy: linear algebra.

My training is also in web development, but the high tech side of things is where I want to end up.