I too do freelance software development. I'm at a pretty small scale right now, but shoot me an email if you'd like to talk about doing some work together in the future. Whether its just passing excess projects off to each other or it turns into something bigger, I am open to discussion. I am booked until end of June right now. My email should be in my profile.
Do you know Object Oriented methodologies? If so (or if you want to learn), consider something like java or python. Are you coming from front end web? Learn node.js, it will have the most transferable knowledge.
Find the best, clearest tutorials that lead you to something similar to what you want to build, and use that tech. Personally, I'll use python/django for my next webapps because I like the tutorials and the programming style/environment. But I don't do games, and django probably isn't the best game framework.
I'd definately use HTML5 for the front end, I love the api's and the skillset is very valuable.
Agreed. I think that there was a lot of snobbery the way he says 'look at how I got rich, you're doing it wrong'. But some of his concepts are immensely valuable. I like how he pushes the idea of strong education in accounting, law, and other business essentials, as well as his use of networking and assessing of market conditions.
Lots of suggestions to travel. If you choose to do so, I'd recommend traveling cheaply and openly. Its an incredible feeling to travel with no defined end date or destination. Try long distance hiking, or a one way ticket to a cheap area of the world. WWOOFing if you're into farming/sustainability. The style of not having an end date allows you to take your time in an unstressfull situation to ponder the world and where you want to take your career, then when something motivates you enough, you can immediately stop and pour all of your energy into it.
I too would be very interested in learning more about how to break in to this type of work. I am a few years out of school with a CS and Math degree, and no clue where to start. I didn't see any contact info in your profile.
http://www.idealist.org/ is the classic outlet for nonprofity jobs. I've found all nonprofit tech jobs to be incredibly unchallenging though, so if you are motivated by hard problems and engineering challenges then you've got some serious job hunting ahead of you.
