Your story really reminds me of what it was like for me to get into the business as well. I was a math undergrad with an Industrial Engineering MS degree, and it took some work to get that first dev job. I'd done some coding for my classes, and I'd written a lot of personal projects. I was doing this back in 2000, when it was more unusual to have something like a github profile where you could share code. It was difficult to get potential employers to look at it.

I couldn't disagree more with jlarocco that this is like trying to be a physician with a law degree. But if you're going to go the untraditional path, it's on you to show that you can do the job. Fortunately, that's getting easier every year - and I get the feeling that the savvier employers are far more likely to look at things like personal projects - in fact, for many of them, that's the main thing they care about, not your degree (BTW, a physics degree is impressive, though they won't care nearly as much as they do about your programming projects).

Oracle... well, yeah, frustrating stuff. But not exactly a great sign about Oracle, either. I think you'll be pretty glad you didn't work for them.