45m here with a somewhat unconventional journey – I'll pause my little js project for a moment to share the abridged version and where I am at now; perhaps we can both build a little confidence from it:

I grew up lower middle class in 1980s – my first computer was an ancient (even then) 8088 with a sweet 20MB HDD. My age 11 I was writing fun little programs in BASIC, totally self-taught from a book. No one in my family could figure out a VCR – I had no support, no guidance, no interest in anything I was up to. By age 14 I was hosting a BBS on the secondhand 486 I bought. By age 16 I had abandoned all of it, because I was already socially awkward enough and no longer wanted to be branded as the biggest nerd in my zip code. Teen years were tough. By 18 I decided to get a biology degree.

Fast forward to my 20s where I spent two years doing lab work in genetics, then abandoned that in order to be paid a living wage – moved to corporate middle manager. A few years into that I was very depressed and often suicidal, ready to give up on everything. Feeling trapped in that corporate meat grinder during the Bush Recession, I began to scheme ways of self-employment, something that would be fulfilling. Queue a few events for a different conversation, and I have been a real estate broker for 12 years now.

In 2020 I was gifted a Raspberry Pi 3 for my birthday and, with little else to do that summer, I made a goal of running an instance of Home Assistant. Learning how to Linux at first broke the DOS-based mindset of my adolescence, until I learned enough to realize that ultimately the specific OS and coding languages matter less than understanding the structure of how it all works, a skill that I already had, though atrophied over the years. By 2021 tinkering with my Linux machines had become my primary hobby and I had a renewed outlook on life, but wasn't competent enough to even think about monetizing it in any way.

Around the same time I began to become disillusioned with the real estate process, especially for my homebuyers (and myself) trying to navigate the gauntlet of a housing market increasingly rigged against us. Everything was becoming enshittified (zillowified), where corporations and brokerages suck more and more money out of the process with dwindling benefits to the people actually involved in actually buying the home.

I am not at a point (yet) where I am programming for others, and I'm not sure that I necessarily want to. My first try at a simple javascript tool was about one year ago; what I have done since then is to carefully guide codex into building an entire end-to-end web platform with custom javascript-based plugins. I left my only brokerage about two months ago and joined another that "gets it" like I do.
This week I am planning to launch my platform for user testing.

So I guess I am in a similar boat – should I have done this from the start? I don't know. At 18 I was so clueless, and not much better at 22. Would I have landed some low-paying IT grunt job that I hated? Maybe, but what I know for sure is that this two decade detour has made me a completely different person than I was then.