Maybe don't work for The Man. It is no easy ride and ten years experience counts for nothing in a world that prefers inexperience and youth to seasoned ability. You could end up working yourself very hard just to pay rent with all your time taken and nothing to show for it.

Consider using the skills you do have to solve a real world problem, provide a service that people do want and create something new.

You can do this with PHP, Ubuntu loaded onto the laptop and Apache running on localhost. With progressive web apps your legacy PHP code with a bit of Google demo code could pass as a reasonable app.

But what to write in a world where everything has been written already? Why write yet another Facebook with deluded dreams that it is to take on the world with 4 billion subscribers before teatime?

This is where you have to be you. Maybe in your recent healthcare there has been a problem whereby the advice you have needed has not been so easy for healthcare practitioners to get to you. Perhaps this could be solved with regular emails and an app, neat usable templates so that the patient can provide the required feedback so the doctors know if progress (or lack of) can be put down to any identifiable factor, e.g. not doing the exercises, taking the pills or eating the right food.

If you find a solution that works for you and people like you in the medical practice that you have been processed by then maybe there can be a proper trial in this mystery patient communication app that keeps people and their recovery on track.

Maybe this app that has not been written yet has not been written yet as the people in big pharma don't understand the problem space, the patient perspective and the medical practice perspective.

Go joint venture with a doctor who wants to scratch the same itch as you do, a doctor with a thousand other patients in the same boat, maybe make the thing a paid for service, perhaps based on a kind of 'dollar shave' model where what is being sent out in the post is not a medicine but maybe an applicator that costs pennies, a test kit that can be done at home, whatever it may be. But then make the product not whatever gets sent out in the post, make it so that Mr Doctor is more Football Coach, giving pertinent advice in a email type of way, virtualised and sent out to help however many patients on to the next step of their recovery.

Maybe tailor this to different profiles - kids, mid life crisis folk, pregnant mums, the elderly, whomever is a sub-target demographic. Make the product not the bits of plastic that get sent in the post but a wider service that includes the emails. Heck, you could even run such a thing for smoking cessation, giving the support and patches needed to get people through it 'dollar shave club' style, where people ultimately end up paying for the support not the patches.

Most of your code could be 'if statements' and beautiful prose, words tightened and given UX goodness in a way your doctor partner could not do.

Make the consent form like a cookie notice, make payment easy with the new payments API. Get the doctor to get the medical practice on board, providing support for forming a legit company, legal advice and accounting service during the 'trial period'.

You might have to dumpster dive and put up with the sheltered accomodation for six months to get such a thing together, plus you might only have five customers on day one, six months down the line. But put incentives as per affiliate marketing to the thing, make it white-labelable and get every medical practice in the land to want to take up whatever this mystery service is to be based on the solid results of your initial trial.

Make your design for the project be about solving the itch that has led you to suffer three years of whatever the medical problems have been, look inside your self and the harsh experience you have had, how would you make it better for the next guy, the next girl, their kids and their grandparents? What can you with your skills and experience bring to the table that those medical professionals with their 7 year degrees and lack of IT not even imagine?

There need not be an exit strategy for your project, no need for big pharma or venture capital to want to take you over. Put together a product that sells itself by word of mouth, a service people are prepared to pay for out of pocket without big insurance getting involved. There are plenty of pills in medicine, not enough love and care automated by emails and PHP 'if' statements, tailored with a few simple forms to a given practice and a given doctor/patient combo.

After the thing is built, after the initial trials are rolling then you should only need patient care content on an on-going basis, this you will need to nabble out of the doctor you joint venture with.

If the project is stable and in a reasonable successful, value giving state then you can then get another job or another project showing the world that you can pull something remarkable out of the bag for the good of mankind rather than your bank balance. You won't have to learn the flavour of the day 'React' code, you could go further up the pecking order into delivering projects, albeit ones of a less than normal nature.

Perhaps the code base you build could actually be used for other projects, maybe other patients with other conditions could do with their own tailored email-automated virtual healthcare help that has a human angle with kind words rather than high tech snake oil voodoo.

The above may be wishful thinking and you might just want a job working for The Man but working for The Man is no panacea. You won't be likely to be working on a project you believe in and you might forever be grafting extra hours to please some jumped up project manager that still blames you for everything.

Maybe go fully ramen noodle, do some dog walking to pay for the noodles, maybe tell lies to the shelter as to why you isn't moving on yet. But, if you can formulate a genuine project that genuinely helps people then you should be able to find a partner in e.g. the medical field and a patron e.g. a medical practice manager, that can make miracles happen.

Just an idea, obviously could be many miles off. But you did ask.