Starting a startup is not just a matter of technical skills and getting hired as a coder might be difficult if you dropped out of college.
A few ideas, straight out of my mind (please don't flame):
- You should start a blog to document your journey anyway. Maybe you'll write a book about the whole experience later.
- Build a website for college dropouts meetups? Maybe you can build something that's bigger than you.
- Learn something, and become an expert at it. Learn Git/GitHub then write about it. Start a "become a Git hero in 6 weeks" blog?
- teach yourself a niche technology, rather than Ruby on Rails: socket.io mastery on node.js maybe? or mongodb admin? or nginx admin?
Don't spread yourself too thin: you can't teach yourself everything at once. Get a Wordpress.com blog instead of hosting one... except if you want to learn it and then teach how to host your own Wordpress :)
Teach yourself something thoroughly, a skill that's rare enough (if you're THE guy who wrote a book on sails.js, who cares you dropped out of college?). D3.js could be another option.
HN is definitely the right place to target the perfect technological niche. I've only suggested a few that I've looked into myself.
Remember, you don't have much to lose yet. But DO something, learn something. You can be bold, but you must ship.
Write a blog howto setup a wordpress website. That's something new.
Where I'm from a college degree doesn't mean you are good in something. But show you are someone who can follow through on something instead of being a quitter.
Off course if there is something else you could show that you can reach a significant goal that needed some persistence please pursue it.
"blog howto setup a wordpress website. That's something new"
Irony I guess :) Hosting a wordpress site (on a VPS for instance) would be more interesting, somewhat less common. I suggested hosting, not setup :)
It requires comparing VPS offers, choosing a distro, securing the server (iptables/ssh), setup for MySql & Apache, installation of Wordpress, setup of a cache (with memcached?), backup strategy... It could be much more than just a blog post, and I know many professionals who are stuck with shared web hosting and who would love some help with a VPS for their hosting needs.
A few ideas, straight out of my mind (please don't flame): - You should start a blog to document your journey anyway. Maybe you'll write a book about the whole experience later. - Build a website for college dropouts meetups? Maybe you can build something that's bigger than you. - Learn something, and become an expert at it. Learn Git/GitHub then write about it. Start a "become a Git hero in 6 weeks" blog? - teach yourself a niche technology, rather than Ruby on Rails: socket.io mastery on node.js maybe? or mongodb admin? or nginx admin?
Don't spread yourself too thin: you can't teach yourself everything at once. Get a Wordpress.com blog instead of hosting one... except if you want to learn it and then teach how to host your own Wordpress :)
Teach yourself something thoroughly, a skill that's rare enough (if you're THE guy who wrote a book on sails.js, who cares you dropped out of college?). D3.js could be another option.
HN is definitely the right place to target the perfect technological niche. I've only suggested a few that I've looked into myself.
Remember, you don't have much to lose yet. But DO something, learn something. You can be bold, but you must ship.