[drinchev]

When I was in my early teenage years I was already making some development efforts on Pascal, VisualBasic and later on I switched to linux and started doing Perl CGI web apps.

Back in time when I had to choose if I want to do CS degree I was already paid as a web developer and doing what I was going to study for. Then I asked some friends that were actually studying CS and they told me that they have a very tight schedule with work in the following disciplines : FORTRAN, ASM, C, C++ . I told them that's too low-level for me and probably I will not use it for my work so I decided to go into completely different sphere ( I graduated law ).

Now I'm not the best programmer lived on the planet, but certainly I still do what I love and I'm paid for web development as high as a senior person, because of my experience - not CS degree.

So... If you think you can make benefit to web development, why don't you start with a simple open source contribution to any of the existing projects and reduce Wirth's law [1] a bit with some low-level skills. But for something more complicated, please consider some experience first in that specific area.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wirth%27s_law