[soulbadguy]

Full-time dev here, offering my 2 cents. One thing to be careful about is that there is difference between loving to code and loving the job of professional programmer. Being a programmer, especially at a big corp(who are the one more likely to hire a junior dev) entails a lot of not so nice things : dealing with legacy code, endless-useless meetings, retarded/old tools. poorly written/undocumented code, debugging etc... etc...

Why don't you leverage your current position as an Sys admin/IT manager. As someone mentioned in the comment, programming is about solving interesting problems, and i am pretty sure you could find some very interesting and useful processes to automate in your current position. As a dev myself, a sys admin/Manager that could produce useful tools for us would be a god send and a very valuable asset to our company.The advantage of staying at you current position and evolving your job responsibility to include some coding is that you get to define and create exactly what software you want , using whichever platform/ language you want which avoiding the not so nice aspect of being a full time dev.

As for the ressources, i would check coursera. They have very good course on CS, especially Algo 1 which looks like exactly what you need.