Strictly engineering is fine, but then I end up feeling guilty that I’m not making any use of abilities that (1) I value highly, and (2) are the only thing other people have considered worthy of sharing links about, blogging about, etc.

Academia seems like a good option in some ways, since my projects tend to overlap with Computer Science research—but I never had good grades, and being a grad student for eight years doesn’t sound very appealing now that I’m 31. And from what I understand, you need to be pretty ‘career-oriented’ if you want a shot at something tenure track, and I’m mostly just interested in ideas.

Doing something entrepreneurial would be sort of ideal, but I’m out of funds and need income. Additionally, I have to limit the amount of time I spend using mouse/keyboard, having run into overuse injuries in the past (so doing this in addition to professional coding work isn’t really an option; and being a diabetic with student loans makes less profitable work more difficult).

The only thing I can see remaining is to do something like R&D for some company, exploring ideas and building prototypes. Is that a thing? How should I pursue it? Are there other options I haven’t considered yet?