The skills one needs to make a living as a developer?

[vinci]

Caution: This thread is me looking for suggestions and advises and not the other way around. It's a question and not a guide.

I haven't coded for almost two years now and now I am looking back at getting to it. I love programming, really do. But I can't feed myself by learning only the things I want to. I would more than love to study python but I just don't foresee myself getting kickass with it anytime soon and making a living.
I have no formal education or anything and just some experience with programming languages like -C++ 
(learned it for game development. Coded in allegro for a while. Gave up on it in the midst. Didn't know maths, couldn't proceed with studying algorithms)

-Java
For some goddamn reasons I thought it was a better idea to learn Java and get into Android development, it was easy to learn Java and I played around with Jswing for a while eventually shifting to JDK for android studying about intents and all. Couldn't get very good at it, found it boring and eventually gave up

-PHP,Javascript(Studied Jquery and Ajax with it. Javascript is easy but never jumped into complexities), Sql(Have worked with mySql only), Css frameworks(Foundation, Bootstrap)

Somebody told me Web development can make you money, and I studied PHP and some web languages got that going for me a...for a while. Made a few (hundred and fifty) bucks on upwork by working for a guy who made me write a dashboard for his company which allowed him to feed data and manipulate it in his database. He wanted it purely noob friendly and responsive and that is where I learned css frameworks.
Assisted a friend in making the dashboard of http://www.evancarmichael.com
Did some javascript based jobs, and then realize most of the jobs were wordpress based. It was finally the time I started with wordpress and eventually studied theme development, learned the ins and outs of it but gave up on 'taxonomies'- it was really fucked up tbh.

Anyway, here I stand, after a while, and I believe i have only gotten worse at the skills I already had. I need to shine them again and so I will be. But now I see more jobs on these platforms that are based on symfony, angularJS, and frameworks like these and I have no frigging idea of them and have never used them. I really and desperately need to make a living. Would the programming whiz at EZ here guide me where to go from here? Mind, I have no formal education and I can only freelance. Would web development be a better option or should I get back to something like C++ or Python?
Once again, I repeat web development and wage-whoring as a wordpress isnt my dream at all, it's not even remotely close to that. I want to learn new things, make video games when it comes to programming but all in all I dont want my creation to be bounded by a computer screen and that makes me want to get into robotics in the future. For that reason, I have been studying and playing aroudn with electronics for a while on basic projects and recently I have studied learning gearology(the mechanics). I am following my heart but I have a stomach to feed to.
Is it something like Wordpress or Drupal I should give time to?

[tunerobrainz]

I think you should start learning a programming language and become actually good at it, since you say you have some knowledge  with Java, why not build up your skills with it? learn more java, it's actually a pretty good language,  if you really want to make a living as a developer then you have to have that drive and motivation to learn..  Good luck...

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[Racheltjie de Beer]

In my opinion:

To start with; are you going to be a specialist or a generalist?  I.e. are you going to go in depth in one language / technology and master it or are you going to become knowledgeable in a few of them.

The inputs that influence your first decision are 1) what the market wants and will need (over the next 5 years) 2) your age 3) do you like tech more than ppl.

Best of luck

[iikibT]

From the things you mentioned, this are all good options:

• Websites: pick a CMS (Wordpress, Joomla, Drupal...) and Jekyll (or similar) for static websites. Use boostrap, jQuery and other standard stuff, it makes your job easier and clients are happy because of familiar stuff. Easy, boring as fuck, pays ok, easy to get work.
• Web applications: stick with PHP + obviously JavaScript on client side. Python or Ruby might be ok on server side, but I see significantly less jobs + most major CMSs are written in PHP. You can do this and above since you will probably be using most of the same stuff. Less easy, less boring, pays ok.
• Android: never done it myself so I can't say much, but a couple of friends do it and it seems like it's easy for them to get projects.

I don't see many Python jobs, I see some C++ jobs but they are usually for full time employment, not per project. This might totally depend on market where you are from, so just check job listings and decide for yourself.

Hope this helps in any way.

[Matangub]

Study the raw programming language such as Java and PHP is really not that of a big deal and its mainly the syntax. Learning to code real life projects with those languages is the really hard part but also the more interesting part.

What i'd suggest you to take something you really would like to build like an app, website etc.. and just start google how you would build it, if you would really want to be a programmer.