You're not nuts. I'm doing it and I'm over 40, I spent a decade or two in civil engineering as a land surveyor and then as a cartographer. That whole industry collapsed, and since I had learned BASIC and C in high school and did some sysadmin UNIX stuff decades ago, I'm getting back up to speed thanks to Python.

My advice would be to get a related job in a shop that uses a similar set of technologies and has programmers on staff. Keep working on your skill set, and get some mentoring from an experienced programmer.

Another avenue I would recommend is to work on a high-quality open source project to get some experience under your belt.