Ask HN: Where do I go from here?
While I've never been actively engaged in the Hacker News I do know what a tremendously helpful and intelligent community it is. Time and time again I've seen people asking for help and being overwhelmed with the supportiveness from fellow members. It is with that said that I myself am in need of some guidance. My story goes like this:

One lazy afternoon, while a sophomore in high school, I watched the movie Antitrust; after which I immediately knew what it was that I wanted to do with my life. I wanted to be a developer of some sort. This lead me to George Mason's Computer Science programming. Prior to which I'd only fooled around with C++ and Java for a year.

In May I graduated from George Mason University with a B.S. in Computer Science and a Minor in Business. Going through college I worked on a networking team (mostly helpdesk) for 5 years and considered it to be my career choice, not programming.
After graduating, I wanted to put my CS knowledge to work to try and start something on the side and that's when I discovered the iPhone SDK. Having only ever programmed in Java the switch to the Objective-C provided a steep learning curve. I have since become more comfortable with it over the past two years and its beginning to pay off. Thus far, I've published 3 applications to the Apple App Store with another on the horizon. These have been learning apps, the first one was a flashlight app, but they got me started.

Last December, after struggling with the economy, the company I worked for had to lay me off. It may have been the best thing that ever happened to me. I was able to focus on learning Objective-C and producing my second and third apps. It has also landed me my current contract where I am a full time iOS developer.

While my current contract is a full time, it will end in mid-January and I need to start looking at my next steps. I have developed my abilities with iOS but I know I still have much to learn. I have become intimately familiar with setting up non-editable table views with custom cells. Most of the work I have done involved multiple views connected with 1 or more nav controllers (tab bar instance), web views, minor exposure to consuming XML data, and displaying maps, graphics, etc… Things that I have not figured out yet and hope to in the future are the playback of media content (streaming and locally stored) and working with advance web service consumption. I feel these two areas are critical to most modern age applications and will need to be integrated in some manor into all apps. I have learned a lot during my 2 years working with Objective-C and know that I could one day become the all - knowing developer I envision myself becoming, but not without being challenged to learn and grow.

I want to further advance and hone my skills, but I also have several responsibilities to pay for. Early in my life to focus on the money I realize, but I have a mortgage, car payment, etc… and the prospect of being out of work again is starting to get me worried. I have been searching the web and passing out my resume like a newsletter, but I have yet to land anything to follow my current contract. I am looking for guidance in where and what to look for in opportunities such as start-ups, contracts, jobs etc… I know I need to find a "job" but I am much more interested in finding an "opportunity." My journey has begun and now I need to find the next step, where do I go from here?