[pageld]

When I'm hiring people for my company (especially new people), I look at things beyond the Binary Tree stuff. People straight out of school can regurgitate that stuff all day but they don't know how to put themselves in a clients position on why it matters when a site is slow and actually make software that helps someone. Obviously, if you have been doing some project management, you are way ahead of those people.

Just build something. Don't worry about the details an how many O's it is. Find a tutorial on codecademy and have some fun with it. Figure out something _you_ could use in your day to day life and build an app/website/facebook thing.

This is just my experience in a SMB software company.

[ChangeThrowaway]

Thanks. I have been working on a few things of my own but have not put the source up on GitHub as I am still pretty embarrassed with my code quality. I mostly use Java and I quite like the language, it requires more lines of code than pretty much any other language but I also kind of like that about it. It certainly makes it easier to come back to a few days or weeks later. Almost self documenting by default.

I also really enjoy C but I feel it is a language that requires at least some CS knowledge to really understand it.

I have pretty good PM knowledge yes, that does help me keep organised and break things up into small, manageable deliverables. I have also worked with developers so I kind-of get how they work, the thins I found hard working with them, etc.

[pageld]

I'll be blunt. Your code is crap. Everyone's code is crap. Code I did 2 years ago was crap. Code I did 10 years ago: shudder.

Don't worry so much about what you "should" be doing and just have fun with it. I ended up making an Android app 3 years ago to help out my wife do "party sales". It ended up with 15k downloads. If I would have actually tried to turn that into a business, it might have actually worked. Was it good code? No. Is it on github. No. Do I say I had 15k downloads on an Android App at every meet up / interviews? Hell yes.

Here's a rant I did when my company was in interview mode: http://www.davepagel.com/?p=58. That will get you to where I'm coming from.