Brilliant description thanks, great to hear an example from the programming side, especailly as you have experience from both.
I thought your comparison of the difference in frustrations from the two sides was particularly good. As you say sysadmin frustrations come from things you didn't design, whereas on the programming side they're more within your control, this is how I imagined it would be so good to hear you say the same.
In terms of finding a job that utilises both skill sets, I at first thought these would be fairly common but have been casually keeping an eye out for a while and haven't seen much. I've seen a few DevOps and WebOps jobs but these seem to be for people who already have extensive development experience under their belt. There doesn't seem to be many jobs for someone who is a strong sysadmin with little programming experience. There's sysadmin +scripting/DBA, but that isn't going to offer much development experience.
I'm already pretty good with C# and Delphi, and have written some changes to some pretty complex code at my current place, but because of some outsourcing decisions higher up they now have an excess of developers and not enough sysadmins/infrastructure so that avenue has dried up and I have to focus on my original responsibilities again.
Employers seem to want more experience than a few small scale changes to take someone on as a full time dev, even at junior level. I get the impression if I want to really move forward I have to write at least one convincing app myself and contribute to some open source projects so that I have something to demostrate to employers that I'm capable. Which is why I'm seriously thinking of taking some time off to do it. Problem with doing it in my spare time is it's very slow progress on top of work and other commitments and will probably take years. At 32 and 2/3 now I'm worried that if I carry on this way, it'll be late thirties before I'm ready to make the jump and no one will want to hire an "old junior developer", just the name sounds contradictory! I'd imagine an employer looking for junior devs will be expecting someone in their early to mid twenties. Guessing there though, if anyone thinks that isn't an issue I'd be interested to hear it.
Anyway yours has been a very inspiring story. I've just got to make a decision whether it's worth the risks of taking the plunge and leaving my current role, or just keep on trying to squeeze it in as a side thing. Thanks for the Pluralsight reference too, haven't heard that one before will look into it.