[henryslater]

I strongly recommend reading "So Good They Can't Ignore You" by Cal Newport. It's full of good ideas but one of the key insights is about spending time building up career capital and then leveraging that to get what you really want.

I don't think anyone else has said this but it's worth noting that most coding jobs don't involve many hours of being alone. I've been in the industry full time since I graduated (a little over ten years ago) and it's been non-stop meetings and people asking for help and spending time with customers and mentoring and demo days and offsites and brainstorming...