I used to work at Teleport and am now at Tailscale. Both are solid products. Sad to see the Team offering disappearing but sounds like they are moving more towards large enterprise vs the small/medium startup/growth companies (while I was there we had a really healthy mid-market team but I think it's all gone now).
Take a look at Tailscale. If you are all in on AWS then using SSM is solid but if you have general access or other cloud access then Tailscale can probably help you out there.
Can also use tools like Teleport that handles all of this programatically. Open-Source core as well (github.com/gravitational/teleport).
Source: I work for Teleport so a little biased, but love the fact that more and more orgs are going away from static creds/keys and using short-lived certs and/or passwordless solutions. Spent many years in a production role and wish I had these tools (or was aware of these tools) back then.
Go volunteer and spend time with those with less resources. Pour yourself into something worthwhile. When you take your focus off yourself and pour it into others things will improve.
I also know this isn't popular here but spiritual fitness is key as well.
ChartSpan and eRad are 2 'startups' in the area growing relatively fast and blend tech and healthcare. Other than that it's a lot of smaller groups. Lot of automotive and Windstream, GE, Fluor, INFOR have strong dev presence here as well.
Don't forget Benefit Focus. They have office in Greenville and Charleston (HQ), have been growing like crazy and went public a couple years back. That company is doing really well and can't seem to hire people fast enough.
Benefit Focus from everyone I've known who has worked there pre-public said the company is absolutely terrible to work for from the engineering department perspective.
I worked there for two years. Loved the people there, but the engineering definitely wasn't great. Imagine a Java application that started in 2000 and hasn't really had any significant rewrites and is now too big to change. They run a good business and offer a lot of value to companies who use their product, but the engineering was definitely tough in the not-so-fun way due to the sheer amount of legacy code.
Ah, welcome to a dilemna I've been wrestling for a couple of years. I actually have an idea/product that has started/stopped a few times that's geared for missionaries, pastors, evangelists, etc.
I just need to find someone smart like the OP here to help execute the vision.
Also, if you're ever in Pennsylvania and go to the train museum in Strasburg you can ride that steam train as well and it is also a blast.