New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Has anyone switched from support to development?

Ask HN: Has anyone switched from support to development?
6 by sldswrk | 6 comments on Hacker News.
Hello, I have about 6 years of technical support experience - in person, remote, covering hardware and software - and have created many tools/web apps in Go and PHP (less so lately, it has mostly been Go) to make my like and work easier along the way but, even though some of these were used for my work, I have no official professional development experience I can put on my resume. Making matters worse, almost all of these projects are closed source due to how integrated they became with the work environment I made them for. I do not have any degrees but I am about 1.5 years away from completing one. Things have become unbearable with my current employer in the last few months and every similar job in my area is a significant pay cut - meaning 30-40% - that I’m not in a position to absorb right now due to health issues. I would love to switch into a development role because that is the future I have been trying to work towards for a long time now. I just don’t have any professional experience I can provide evidence for and am feeling a bit lost there; not to mention almost all of the entry level positions I come close to qualifying for are using things like C#/.NET & Java. Have any of you transitioned from a technical support type of role into a development role recently? If so, how did you do it?