When I hit a wall in my early 30s, after a decade of testing and writing software, I went back to school and got a bachelors degree in CS. It has proven to be a good decision. It was not easy to manage the logistics, and it cost a small fortune in loans to maintain a family and mortgage through that, but it was worth it. I started out taking night classes at community college and eventually went back full time to finish up. If you just want to branch out a bit a mentor may help but this is such a broad field it’s hard to teach yourself all the basics, especially once you have financial pressures and need to keep working. Good luck!
I did the same thing. Times are good now, but they were not in 2001, or 2009, and having a degree helps. even saying you're halfway through your CS degree helps.
I was working and took one class a week, at nights and/or on weekends. This was not all that bad because even if it went slowly, I really learned each subject well and got high marks.
At one point I got laid off, and went full-time on my severance, unemployment and savings. When unemployment ran out I got a low paying, part time consulting gig (and cut my classes from 5 a semester to 4 and then 3).
After class or office hours with your CS professors helps. They often know a lot.
Also, there are projects out there like this - https://github.com/danielgindi/Charts . It is in iOS, an OS you know. There are plenty of open issues, and there are plenty of pull requests that have been accepted. It is a pretty popular library, so the devs with commit access probably (although not necessarily) know what they're doing. I'm sure they'd appreciate you jumping in and looking through the issues and seeing if you can solve one of the problems. Then you send it in and see what they say. As you become familiar with the project, you can watch how they handle issues and write code, and will learn more.
That's just one project that might be up your alley, there are many more.
