Have you tried agency work? There are places where they just need hands on keyboards doing web front end for example, and the barrier to entry is not so high.

Have you tried agency work? There are places where they just need hands on keyboards doing web front end for example, and the barrier to entry is not so high. Might not be glamorous, and can be a grind, but it's a decent entry point into the industry. Open source might be another good avenue. I've hired for 8 technical roles over the past year, and one of the "requirements" we would have for going forward to the interview stage, would be that the candidate has 1) worked on software that people actually use, and 2) has done it in a team/collaborative setting. It sounds like you have done a lot of interesting projects, but doing something that just has to work for yourself has a very different set of constraints than building something in a team for someone else. Since you've done linux admin, DevOps might be another good route. Getting AWS/GCP certification is not that difficult, and would add to your profile a bit of confidence that you have some experience and knowledge about industry standards. It sounds like you've done a lot of interesting, creative projects, and there's one role we hired last year honestly you would have been a good candidate for as a lab support engineer. But the thing you have to understand is that hiring managers generally are not looking for "interesting" candidates. In a perfect world we would, but in a hiring process, you may be bombarded by dozens or hundreds of CVs, and you have to filter that down to a hand-full of candidates who you are going to interview. So the first round of filtering is just to weed out anyone who is potentially high risk of not working out. If you have to teach someone how to work in a professional environment for the first time, that carries risk, so at least you want to see some markers that this person understands how professional software development works and will fit into this environment. Or, you can make friends with people in the industry, and get a referral. Or, you can work on something interesting enough to get some widespread attention, and then hiring managers will call you.