[trestletech]

In addition to the other suggestions here, Academia could be another interesting route. Look at the job boards for local colleges/universities/research centers in your area. They're typically struggling to find technical people to either:

1. maintain and update the main websites

2. administer other IT-related systems on-campus (may require brushing up on some Linux or Windows Server skills)

3. help with the coding side of their research

There's a lot of low-hanging fruit available when it comes to coding needed for a research grant. Sometimes it's just standing up a basic website for a lab, but you'd be invaluable if you were able to help someone scrape together their pile of perl/R/python scripts into something that can be be hosted on a website. And IMHO the bar for quality is usually quite low -- many labs just want to have enough to earn/fulfill a grant and then move you on to the next project.

I'll warn you that there's not a strong career path available for software developers in Academia at the moment. So you may eventually need to break out. But it strikes me as a viable way to get a few years of real software dev experience working on interesting projects which would definitely put you in a better spot to branch out elsewhere.