Ask HN: Passionate bootcamper without a degree seeking advice
I have long been interested in programming, but became passionate about it a
couple years ago. I am determined to make it my full-time job.

I would like advice on the following:

How to:

become goal-oriented?

differentiate myself from "boot-campers/coders" on job applications?

What should my portfolio look like? Now just some ragtag projects and one-off
scripting solutions. I have some big ideas, but having trouble committing.

A little background:

I was working studiously toward becoming a web developer until I got spooked by
job data and the AI hype this past March, pivoted to ML, hated it, worked
through a C textbook, considered embedded/hardware but think it's probably
out-of-reach/unrealistic goal, so I'm back to Rails.

I have a degree from a good university, but:

it is a philosophy degree

I graduated with a 2.6 GPA, so grad school feels out-of-reach

I have a family, so not tons of extracurricular time. Luckily, my job is so
easy that I only work for a few hours per week.

I have a senior role in a mid-sized human services nonprofit's accounting
department

My boss doesn't understand tech at all

desk calculator, paper and pen preferred over excel sheet

the most advanced thing they can do is create a pivot table. They have no
idea how to manipulate it aside from adding fields and displaying
aggregated sums.

The tech situation is abysmal:

Use an ERP (GP 2018) that is in extended support

hundreds of excel workbooks spread across numerous network drives on an
in-house server that frequently fails

an IT department that is beyond useless--they tend to break things
whenever they attempt a fix for any problem that goes beyond turning it
off and back on again.

The company pays >$110k a year for this

I have pointed out its failures but have been rebuffed by management

two shitty web apps. I truly think I could build one of them better
myself.

I requested a role change to db admin/software developer, but was denied and
given a senior role in current dept instead.

There is zero demand for tech solutions--everything just "works" (albeit
with tons of extra effort on the part of the hard-headed and huge amounts of
waste)

even if there were, I feel that implementing said solutions would be near
impossible given the incompetency of the aforementioned IT dept

Related skills:

Languages/frameworks

Solid on Ruby (actively learning Rails), Python, C, SQL, Power Query/BI

Some JS, Visual Basic, CSS, HTML

Intrigued by Go, Haskell, Scala

Concepts

basic:

DSA (BST, hash maps, linked lists, graphs, b-trees)

ML (eg completed, Google's crash course, some intermediate Kaggle courses)

Computer architecture

Unix

solid on databases and non-cloud web technology

no knowledge of containerization tools, but understand they are important

Soft

Good:

Communication

Technical writing

Teaching/training

Creative

Problem solving

Always meet deadlines

Poor:

Network

Learning pace (obsessive/perfectionist tendencies, go down rabbit holes)

Difficult to be nice to people who clearly aren't even trying and
constantly ask for help, or are just plain incompetent

Long-term planning/project management

I see a lot of talk about boot-campers who are in it for a quick buck. Although
my passion was sparked by <https://www.theodinproject.com> (web dev), I do not
consider myself to fall into this category: I literally dream about programming
most nights. I wake up at 4 AM and can't go back to sleep because I am too
excited to get back to work. I think computers are the closest thing to magic
that I'll ever see.