I’ve barely written code in over a year, and haven’t done any significant greenfield work my whole career. The work I have done has been mostly in legacy or obsolete technologies, and by that I mean mostly old version of stuff that’s still out there.

There are heaps of legacy code out there needing to be maintained, and it seems like all the cool kids just want to do green field dev because fixing somebody else's insane code isn't "fun". You're likely more qualified than you think, you just need to market your strengths.

Get on with a contracting firm. They will place you on a dev project and have you coding in no time.

A lot of companies are not allowed to interview the contractors (since they are not employees) and the contract firms can swap anyone into a spot after they get the contract signed. (Granted there is a lot of wink and nod stuff that goes on)

Horrid pay, not allowed to say you worked for (GE, Microsoft, whoever...) and crap benefits but you get real world experience and may even get lucky. You can say..."while at Microsoft I..."

Nobody writes tools that only work on brownfield code, and there are plenty of tools that only work if you start a new project using their tools.

Green field code is easy-mode, not hard mode. Nothing is in your way, nobody expects anything from you (yet) because they have no basis of comparison. The real reason people want to do rewrites is that they want that greenfield experience without having to quit. It almost never works.

Start a new project on the side, using the skills you’d like to develop.

How do you balance this on the resume. I got plenty of cool project ideas, but outside of entry level, it just seems odd to list them on the resume (which I presume is the only way they’ll be seen by anyone giving the consensus on LinkedIn and personal sites). o feel it’d just look weird when you have projects and skills that seemingly have no relevance to your work experience especially when applying to roles that are mid level or senior.

It seems that a lot of things are just no possible to learn on the side as well. For example, doing anything at a large scale. That could be HPC stuff or just designing and building systems that need to handle high throughput without slowing or failing. I can’t afford to have the sort of projects that would allow me to learn those things.

The exception I can imagine is working on high visibility OSS projects and is a huge time sink and might as well be a second job.

Too negative an outlook, imho. You do the research and add the keywords, maybe project to your resume. If grilled you say I have some experience but am not an expert.

Also, you’d be surprised how much you can get done on a modern PC with vms or containers, it isn’t the nineties or aughts any longer. We used to run a full vfx company on what amounts to a single souped $10k PC today.

Or, rent a heavy-duty cloud vm for $100 a month, small investment but clock ticking will get you motivated.