Do I have enough skills to get a programming job?

[caelum_carmine]

I've now decided to devote all my free time towards getting a job as a programmer. I currently work in a hotel. But I'm wondering if I should devote 25% of my free time towards getting a job and 75% of my free time towards getting new skills or do I have enough skills to start applying. Here's the basics, I've calculated 9600 hours spent coding over an 8 year period, 90% of which was devoted to Python, the other 9% was devoted to VBA for Excel and the other 1% to other languages. I've uploaded 4 projects to Github, one of them is solid code, it analyzes the Latin language. Another code was actually rather amazing, it calculates the consistency of natural language sentences, but I stopped working on it 3 years ago and I can't get it work now, so it's pretty hard to raise eyebrows when you say, yea, I still have the inputs and outputs to this amazing code I once wrote but I can't get it to work now.

My problem is that since I've mostly worked by myself on projects of an academic nature such as philosophical logic and the processing of foreign and ancient languages that I don't have the typical marketable skills such as knowledge of MySQL, numpy, pandas, flask, django, java, javascript, AWS.

I'd say I have about 200 hours experience with Google Cloud. I've been on the job market for 3 days now and have gotten 4 emails from American recruiters and of course lots from Indian recruiters, though from what I've read an email from an Indian recruiter means nothing, but I have not been able to get an interview from any of the 4 American recruiters.

I want to use my time wisely and if it turns out that no one will hire someone whose only skill is Python and maybe a little bit of Cloud, then I need to know that and devote more time to getting more skills.

You can take a look at my resume below.

[ndc85430]

The first thing to ask is what kind of technical area do you want to work in? Python is used for various things from web development, to data science and automation (for example, the team that manages databases at my company write programs to manage the lifetimes of virtual machines, audit them and other things). What kind of work you want to do will dictate the sorts of skills you need to develop.

I'd also say that developing more skills is never a waste of time. You're going to need to do it anyway throughout your career. So, find a project to develop some of the skills you need, or at least are interested in.

There are skills that are generally useful, though. Concepts that guide you towards good designs of your software (e.g. SOLID, separation of concerns, loose coupling, ... - there are others). Also, automated testing is hugely important for a practicing software developer. We have to change our systems a lot - adding new functionality, changing functionality, fixing bugs, but also other less visible changes (from a user's point of view) like restructuring the software as it evolves. Automated testing helps give you a safety net - if you break something while changing the code, running your tests should tell you that as they'll start failing.

So, you'd be wise to look into some of these ideas as well as specific technologies.