As an ex-code school founder, I can tell you that the “half heartedly” part is a major red flag. Either do it full ass, or get some structural support like a tutor, a code school, or a college.

For what it’s worth, I’ve seen a lot of applicants and graduates and I think it’s important to tell everyone who’s making this switch that doing this without any structure, only from tutorials and on your own, is an extremely rare thing to pull off. I’ve only met a few.

One of our application questions was “tell me about a long and difficult project you’ve worked on. How did you sustain the effort when things got difficult?” If the answer was anything less than 3-6 months, and didn’t include relying on their community and support network for help, I would talk to them about other options.

I hope you understand that I’m telling you all this because I want to support you. I’ve seen this play out a lot, and you really do have options. But if you stay on the course you’re on, the answer is “NO” and that would be a bummer. Please work on building your support crew, get some fellow students who also want to do it, hire (or recruit) a local programmer to do code review once a week for the group. It doesn’t take much and it shouldn’t bankrupt you, but you and everyone else on the planet require help to get on this particular train.

If you start a second market and outline the steps you’re going to take, I will put every bit of mana I own down on YES (and pay to sponsor it like crazy)