Oh hell yes! That's awesome, and so are you. Please, definitely DM me on Twitter if you run into any roadblocks at all. I will always make time to help someone learn this stuff.
Believe it or not, you managed to hit on the most lucrative long-term strategy, too. That's exactly the mindset that the best programmers have. If you like it, then a job is pretty much a matter of time.
Best of luck, friend. Take care of yourself, and prioritize yourself. You're worth it.
I'm always curious what non-IT folks that use some rather IT-specific tools do (not that Emacs is just for coding like gcc, but it's pretty rare to see it jump over the wall).
Attorney but I read a ton of programming-related stuff, know how to use the command-line and used Emacs for a bunch of stuff. It's my shell, rolodex, text editor, calendar, file manager and, being Emacs there's a lot of little functions and stuff that I've built for myself and/or to make things easy.
This always amazes me to hear from non-IT people. I’ve spent so much of my life being forced to use Cybernetting AnyOffice* that I can’t see how anybody would have been exposed to anything else without being part of some rogue nerd culture.
Good on you, man, and honestly, I should be the last to take advice from, but you might benefit from a serious skills check-in to see what your real deck of cards is. Sit down and do it with someone who likes you and wants you to succeed, because it seems like you might not be in a state to evaluate yourself favorably. You might discover that you’re sitting at the top and selling yourself into the bottom. I did this, and it was disastrous for my career. There’s probably an upward step you’re not seeing.
I know plenty of tech-adjacent people whose interests stop at Wired articles, but it's really impressive you've actually dived (doven?) into the command line and Emacs, even to the point of building stuff!
You'll definitely be great at software engineering, as the intuition to dive deep into the bowels of these archaic ways of using a computer seems to come naturally! (especially compared to my attorney friends, who basically just use the browser, Outlook, and Word, and probably think a "command line" is some sort of military jargon)
I already use Emacs for everything since 2003, so...