Last year the rewrite of an ancient system (VB6/mainframe COBOL) was started. Instead of moving to modern architecture management decided to rewrite the app's functionality into our last gen WinForms client/server arch. I set up a meeting to present alternatives and plead for some level of modernization. After presenting and asking management to plan for five to ten years in the future instead of just this year's budget my director said, "In five to ten years I'll be retired on a beach in Tahiti and this will be your problem to solve." It was the last straw and I left the company shortly after. Last week I found out the director was force retired out of the company. I sent her a congratulations slip and a cocktail umbrella with "Tahiti" written on it.

!rant
TL;DR: New(-ish) dev looking for advice to improve workflow and new languages. Hopefully worth a read though :)

Newbie developer here, I took a web applications development class this year since I could take that at another campus rather than do general education courses at my home school, and I have learned and earned a CIW Certification for HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript, though I know the certificates do squat if I can't apply myself to them, and I have learned PHP and MySQL.

I want to learn more, technically-applicable languages.

My setup is barebones (to a Linux diehard's eyes), with a gaming laptop that I do a lot of workstation stuff on, an RPi 3 B that I do some Linux-y stuff on, and a less-powerful Development Laptop (that I call a devtop) that I occasionally do work away from home on.

I'm sure most will cringe and weep at my workflow, as I use Windows 10 on both systems and the standard NOOBS software on the pi, and I use Brackets as my text editor, as well as the XAMPP AMP stack for testing.

My biggest questions are what could I do to improve my workflow, and what languages should I learn/apply myself to for real-world application (such as Node.js for live-updating server-side applications or C# for Windows applications)?

Thank you for taking the time to read this, any feedback is helpful! I'm just a high school student with a lot of enthusiasm for development!