I can't help but feel a bit awkward writing one of these 'which technology?' posts, as I know there's no "right" answer - or at least, the closest thing to an answer possible is "don't tie yourself into any one technology and to keep learning". With that said, I'm making the post anyway, because I just really *don't know what to do*.

I'm early-twenties with four years of commercial experience in web development. That said, my actual role has been a whole manner of IT-related things (i.e. I've been an 'IT guy' for a company), which I've worked to sway towards my interests (development) wherever possible. Over the years I feel as though I've covered quite a lot of ground. I've gone from pretty much nothing (other than a primitive understanding of HTML/CSS) to working with:

- PHP (stayed vanilla and built a few large'ish applications before moving to Symfony2, which forever instilled my faith in using frameworks (once you have a grounding in X technology)).
- JS/Node (various frameworks/libraries) - angular, ember, meteor, jade, stylus, all sorts.. far too much to list, with varying levels of experience.
- MySQL, redis and mongo.
- Source control: Git
- Jenkins for continuous integration.
- Various package managers.
- Lots of IDE's, though a huge fan of Jetbrain's PHPStorm and Webstorm.
- Managing VPSes - configuration, backup/restores, updates, etc.
- Light exposure to C, C++, C#, Java, Ruby, but nothing beyond toy projects - parsing CSV files into a database, various console applications.

It doesn't look like much when I lay it out like that. I'm sure there's plenty more stuff I've played with, but I think that's the problem. All I've done is played with it - toy or CRUD-based apps. I feel a little ashamed to call myself a developer at this stage since most of my expertise is in PHP and javascript. Two languages that receive *a lot* of hate for various reasons. I know there will always be haters, but I feel as though I must be missing out by not working in a language that has some general level of respect/praise. i.e. something statically/strongly typed that's compiled.

I feel like this job is a dead end for my career. They're not even remotely interested in IT/development here, it's just an accessory to their business (nothing wrong with that, but it stops me from growing as a developer). One thing I'm currently lacking massively is team experience. I think my goals are to get a job focused on web app (or just 'app') development. If I were to go down the app development route I need to take on obj-C (or Swift?) or Java... or both.

I did my first year of a software development degree with the Open University (UK), but was disappointed with the course content - practically nothing to do with software development and only very primitive stuff at that. I don't feel like forking out another £10k for two years of deadline-stress that could be better spent teaching myself. I know *how* to learn, I just can't decide on what to learn.

Going back to what I was saying about learning languages, it looks like C# would be a strong choice going forward, especially with all the latest moves Microsoft have made, but I have to be honest, it does look a little intimidating from my current position. A new IDE, package manager, language, libraries, all the history surrounding the ecosystem (even just winforms and WPF on the GUI side of things) is a lot to take on.

But then with all that said, ES6 has a lot of praise (and a lot of controversy), so I feel maybe I should just stick with that.

There are just so many routes to go down, I just feel completely paralyzed.

I *think* my goals are to: get a job at a young company working on an interesting software product, whilst working on some kind of lifestyle business(es) on the side, with the aim of transitioning to doing that full time in a few years.

My questions/doubts:

- Is the degree worth finishing? Extra debt, time and stress with arguably less learnt than reading books, watching videos and planning my own studies. Is the piece of paper worth it? I can't help but think most young companies wouldn't be too fussed, provided I could show my experience through open source projects or contributions relevant to the post. I'm especially hesitant since I eventually aim to be working for myself, for which a piece of paper is worthless. If I did finish it, it would have to be a remote/distance-learning setup alongside my job (or another job...).

- Should I learn another technology? C#? Whilst I understand a lot of the concepts in C#/strongly typed & compiled languages, I don't have any experience in them. I feel as though I'm missing out on important learning experiences by using something dynamically typed & interpreted... especially since it's much easier to shoot yourself in the foot. Will my employment prospects be better with C# or Java, given how young NodeJS is? Or should I focus on becoming an expert at what I already have some grounding in?

Does anyone have any advice/guidance? What would you do in my shoes? At the end of the day, I'm only 22, so I have plenty of time to figure things out.