I would ignore the CS degree requirement. In my experience there are plenty of shops that will happily look at someone with no degree as long as it's supplement

I would ignore the CS degree requirement. In my experience there are plenty of shops that will happily look at someone with no degree as long as it's supplemented with some other way of showing you have relevant experience. If you want to look at a career change I would say you need to do the following: 1. Start learning the current state of the art. You might be surprised how much of your previous experience is still relevant. 2. Build some things that are a little more ambitious than maintaining a blog or home automation. Feature those things in your resume. If you can show the code you wrote when building it on Github/Gitlab/Bitbucket or something then that's a great way to provide a substitute for academic credentials.