Ask HN: What was the best decision you made in your career?

Quitting my job at a family-like studio and going freelance. I regret the loss of comfort, familiarity, and semi-security, but my pocket book doesn't, the pay increase was gigantic. AND I've gotten to see the world, lived in 7 different time zones.

This was back in 2009. The NYTimes interactive team had hired folks (Big Nerd Ranch) to hold an in-office Rails lesson, and my boss sent me over to learn with them. While I did have a computer engineering degree, my webdev experience was limited to making elaborate (but poorly-coded) PHP and Flash scripts. I was actually hired originally to be a web producer (mostly tasked with posting stories online and making the HTML proper), but learning Rails not only taught proper web app conventions, but allowed me to build important data projects, such as this one: https://projects.propublica.org/d4d-archive/

I stopped using Ruby and Rails and opted for Python when I started teaching at university, because I realized Ruby wasn't ideal for teaching novice programmers. But I've recently picked up Rails again for some freelance work and have been delighted at how easy it is to get back into. My sense is that Ruby and RoR are no longer as dominant or competitive compared to Python, but it still seems to be a very high in-demand skill because of all the apps/startups that used RoR from the time I learned it back in 2009. That said, learning RoR was less about having the specific skill on my resume, and more about my first exposure to professional and open-source application development, which I'm embarrassed to say I had virtually no experience with when majoring in computer engineering.

Today, I personally would recommend people learn Python and do Django, even though I've personally never used Django myself, but feel confident that it's not much different than my RoR experience.

a bit?

Technically the decision was made for me, but changing jobs was the best thing that ever happened to me. I went from a toxic culture I worked at for 16 years (well, it was about 10 years of the toxic culture that snuck in without me realising) to work for a small consultancy where I have a boss that actually appreciates everything I do and supports me in what I need.

The massive pay increase was just a bonus on top of all that.

Did Recurse Center in 2012. It started a snowball of growth that hasn't showed signs of stopping. The Recurse Center is a self-directed, community-driven educational retreat for programmers. https://www.recurse.com/