Reddit reviews Cryptography for Developers

You should definitely have solid mathematical skills, but computer science helps as well. I did both (bachelors in both, masters in both, PhD in a mathematics/CS hybrid department).

First try to get a broad knowledge of the subject, then figure out what area interests you the most. Here's a few references that might interest you:

• So you want to be a cryptographer: Bruce Schneier's essay on how to become a cryptographer. You should read this first!
  
• How not to learn cryptography: Seny Kamara's blog on how he learned cryptographer, and opinions on what is right and wrong.
  
• The Matasano crypto challenges: Shows you a lot of crypto mistakes that happen in practice, that a beginner can learn without having heavy math skills.
  
• So you want to learn to break ciphers: My blog showing some basic, non-mathematical techniques for breaking ciphers.
  
• Tom St Denis' book: Tom became a celebrity in crypto. In the early days, he was a highschool student, not doing his homework but instead learning crypto through the old sci.crypt newsgroup. He had a very strong thirst for knowledge, and a bunch of people were happy to help him. He ended up writing an awesome crypto library (LibTomCrypt) and I believe he even got a few scientific publications, and became very well known in the crypto community.
  
  
  Crypto is a big, big field, and there are all sorts of places to specialise in. Find out what your passion is and go from there.
  

An oldie but goodie is Tom St. Denis Cryptography for Developers.

He also has a Bignum Math book.

This is the kind of stuff you want to read if you're planning to write a cryptographic library with implementations. And then you want to read the nacl paper as well.

This book if you literally want to know how everything works on a very low level:
http://www.amazon.com/Cryptography-Developers-Tom-St-Denis/dp/1597491047

Read about LibreSSL. See if you can get Nginx+LibreSSL working, although this is not always such a good idea yet for Linux.

Configuring SSL on Nginx is pretty easy. I'd rather use Nginx as opposed to Apache. I don't really see why you would want to start your own CA.

Some links on SSL+Nginx:
https://yoirtuts.com/index.php?title=SSL_Server_Test
https://www.trevorparker.com/hardening-ssl-in-nginx/
https://yoirtuts.com/index.php?title=Nginx_SSL_Best_Settings

What products are you guys working on that you would like to integrate with SSL?

Two things you can to start out with:
1.) Get a free SSL cert at startssl.com and set it up with Nginx on your personal website and try get an A+ rating on https://www.ssllabs.com/ssltest/index.html
2.) Write some code that does something with libressl or openssl.

Watch this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z7Wl2FW2TcA