The biggest thing that helped my career and confidence was participating in open source projects. I was a terrible coder at the time, but I learned a great deal

The biggest thing that helped my career and confidence was participating in open source projects. I was a terrible coder at the time, but I learned a great deal and it gave potential employers an additional degree of confidence. Given your unique experience, you could probably find niche pilot tools that could use help. Check out freshmeat.net and other sites to find projects that are both interesting to you and could benefit from additional input.