Wheeeeeee!

As of about 2:30 PM on Thursday, December 12... I have a job as a front-end/interface developer!
As I had mentioned in my previous post, I was able to spin my brief amount of training and lack of experience as a plus, because they were specifically looking for someone who they could train on a new platform--someone who was willing and able to learn quickly.

It's pretty crazy when I take a step back to look at it: with no programming experience, I wrote my first lines of markup about 10 weeks ago.  I wrote my first lines of JavaScript maybe about 6 weeks ago.  But I was able to point to what I had learned and built in the course of a grand total of about 8 weeks' time, and use it as evidence that I'm able to pick up something new very quickly, and motivated to do so... and that was good enough for my new employers.  So now... I'm a developer.  A month short of my 40th birthday, I've successfully switched career tracks in the span of about 2 months' time.  I have no illusions as to how lucky this was... but it's been a bad-luck kind of year for the most part, so it feels really good to finally have something break my way again!

Floundering About

With the holiday season firmly upon us, I feel like I'm drifting a bit in terms of my training, self-directed learning, and career switch efforts.  I have begun applying for entry-level developer jobs, but of course I don't expect much in the way of success at this point--I really need to build my skill set and portfolio a bit more.  If nothing else, recruiters will probably be turned off when they learn that my level of experience with any given skill is roughly 2-2.5 months!  I suppose my best strategy there is to try to spin it into "look at how fast I can learn new things--I did all this in only 6-8 weeks!"
Still, it will be an uphill climb for a low-end job, and the holiday slowdown will make it worse--but at this point I have no reason not to apply to anything that seems like I might have some chance of being able to do.  After all, the worst-case scenario is that I spend some time in an interview and don't get the job--hardly the end of the world.
I did just have a phone interview earlier this morning.  The recruiter admitted that I might not have enough experience for the role... but it sounds like a lot of it would be on-the-job training with a proprietary tool set anyway, so learning ability is more important than current skills.  Again, hopefully I can turn my current state into a plus in that regard, by demonstrating the speed with which I can learn and improve.