About 8-9 years ago I started getting into programming as a hobby. I started with my TI-86 calculator, and then moved into using Visual Basic. After about a year I started playing around with HTML and JavaScript. Then I discovered Flash; I programmed with Actionscript 2.0 for about 2 years which lead me to start using Coldfusion. After a while I realized that A) I am not a designer, and B) with the way that things were going with AJAX, .NET, and PHP there wasn’t much future in Coldfusion/Actionscript.

I had been working mostly as an administrative assistant, but about 3-4 years ago I got a position where I would be doing some web development, and assisting the system admin with supporting windows desktop PCs. I have gotten some decent experience over the past few years, but it has been spread out in somewhat disparate areas:

I spend about 40% of my time writing PHP/MySQL and HTML/CSS, etc. I spend about 20% of my time helping users with PC questions. I spend about 20% of my time doing administrative things (mail-merges, excel, etc). I spend about 20% of my time managing / creating reports from our Access Database.

I have also taught myself many things on my own, and now have a beginner’s level understanding of things like: Windows Server, Java, Linux, Objective-C, SQL Server, C#, C++, Ruby, Mac OSX, VBA, VBScript, and basic IP networks.

I feel like I am in a bit of a rut – I want to get my career moving, but I am not sure what I need to do. If I practice with C# and SQL Server Express for a year will that be enough to get me in the door somewhere? Would it be easier to get a position if I teach myself Linux/Apache since I have more experience with PHP/MySQL?