As someone who worked in the Boston area for a dozen years starting in 1980 and then moved to the D.C. area for a dozen years, I can tell you that D.C. is indeed not the place you want to be, especially after the telecom crash early last decade which zapped a whole swath of interesting jobs.

As far as I can tell Silicon Valley, not "the West Coast", has been the place to be, probably tracking the development of the single die microprocessor (although there are many other reasons, and some clear reasons why e.g. Route 128 all but died by the early '90s).

If I were you I'd get enough money in the bank to cover the usual contingencies and then move to SV.

The one exception is if you have a serious clearance. Ignoring for the moment that SV is reputed to be particularly bad when it comes to age discrimination, if you're approaching the 35-40 year old range and can't hide that and you want to continue programming, you need to be thinking really hard about how you'll do that. As far as I can tell, the three best ways normal mortals can are by holding a serious clearance, getting into the embedded field, or going into multi-client consulting.

But if you're somewhat before that age range, now could be a good time to try out the startup scene in SV.