Can’t give any solution because I had the same problem pretty much where I live and I just went into web development because I gotta eat. Though I can say that nobody stops you from doing all kinds of programming in your free time, open source also gives you a lot of interesting things to work on if you have the time to dive in and try to get your hands dirty with a project. There definitely are differences in common practices and concepts when going from web dev to other areas of computer science, but you can always find parallels and similar logic. It definitely would help to be able to properly study new things, but it’s both very time consuming and expensive, so that’s not a solution for everyone.