Advice from experienced developers on what steps to take next

Your attitude and desire to learn is obviously amazing. I can see you learned some PHP app development and front-end stuff. In the Boston area, Ruby on Rails and straight-up Javascript skills are the most in demand and job-hunting as a Rails dev is more like having the jobs hunt you! I don't know about the UK, but I suggest going on github.com (if you haven't already), making an account, and scoping out and forking whatever repo's interest you. Pay close attention to how people collaborate using git and get a good idea for the generally accepted workflow. Contribute to something if you think you can fix a bug! Get involved locally, find meetups in your area and find developers whose code you admire and follow them everywhere (online, like, twitter/github, not in real life...that'd be creepy). Watch the way interesting projects develop and how they go about it. Look at the commit history, you can learn alot about how we develop software that way!

Frankly, I'm not an amazing programmer, I'll be the first to admit it. But I've worked in startups in the Boston tech scene for years and I can say being able to collaborate is what keeps me paid, at the end of the day. Having a good idea of how to collaborate with other developers and how to use the open-source tools we work with every day is often more valuable than how many crazy javascript tricks you can pull off. I know this all sounds a bit vague, but there's no real roadmap, that's the beauty and freedom of working in tech and it's a little bit scary. Go with whatever language/tools you find come easiest and what you read blogs about for fun, etc. But #1 - look to other developers in your area, regardless of what people say, I think the web dev community is kind and welcoming to newbies. :)

EDIT: That was an answer to a bigger question than you asked maybe. So my TL;DR answer is learn RUBY ON RAILS next k goodluck!

Ruby on Rails is much friendlier to work with for developers on a team. I'm going to be flat-out honest about how I see it. Rails is a cult, you build the software "The Rails Way", and everyone does things according to this doctrine and there's not too much room for messing around. It's a cult, but it's a really nice cult full of helpful developers and an active community, along with tons of well-maintained and tested gems (like libraries to plug-in to your Rails app) available that integrate seamlessly....IF you adhere to cult doctrine. Luckily, the cult doctrine is very well laid-out and consistent, and makes enough sense that it feels natural to follow it.

If you want to spend hours meticulously configuring and designing the nitty-gritty low level bits and pieces of your app, sure, write PHP. Wrangle with all that SQL spaghetti in your code. If you want to work with easily readable, understandable code and to spin up a working skeleton project in less than an hour, learn Rails. Long as you follow the "Rails Way", it's going to be easy and fun to make something happen. That's why so many startups choose to use it.

There are other interesting frameworks that I think it's worthwhile to get into however, none of them are written in PHP. Meteor looks pretty interesting and it appears they have an active community in London: http://www.meetup.com/Meteor-London/

Sean,

You are very smart to do your research and be proactive about managing your career. After considering your question and doing some research, I'd encourage you to hone your skills with JS. It looks like you already have a firm grasp on the concepts and have accumulated a working knowledge. I'm not really biased towards any particular camp, but if you look into Angular and Node you can see the trend. It's obvious that Google tends to favor JavaScript.

Lauren is a wealth of really great information on Rails and she has great advice when she says to network with others in that camp. I know there is a lot of loyalty in that community and several startups are opting for it, but you should be aware that the market share makes it a niche. Less than one percent of servers currently run Ruby. There is a lot of demand right now for Rails developers though... I'll be the first to admit that PHP has several evolutionary faults as a language; but Wikipedia, Facebook and popular CMS platforms like Drupal and Wordpress are among the 82% of the internet utilizing PHP. In regards to SQL, you will be well advised to know a bit about several varieties of databases, regardless of which path you choose.

In my opinion, you would be well advised to spend some time mastering JavaScript. It is the de-facto language of the internet and companies like Mozilla and Google (that make browsers) are heavily invested in it. It's gaining ground as a server side language as well. MongoDB has a growing and very enthusiastic community --NoSQL has advantages -- and Mongo fits in nicely as a database solution. Ultimately, you should pick a language you really like and master it. As long as you are great at delivering information from a server to a screen, you'll be successful in whatever (and however many) languages you want to take on.

Hope this helps.