Take internships. Even if they're unpaid. This may not be popular advice, and you do need to watch out for internships that are truly exploitative, but many sma

Take internships. Even if they're unpaid. This may not be popular advice, and you do need to watch out for internships that are truly exploitative, but many small startups simply have limited resources, and are looking for people who want to make the experience instead of pay tradeoff. Ability to learn and solve problems will be more important for these positions than previous experience. Also, nthing the advice of work on your own projects. If you can't think of an original problem you'd like to solve, choose a web app you really like and try to recreate your own version of it. The main thing is to have a complete goal, like "Learn how to build a site with Rails that shows me graphs of a user's twitter network's activity", not "Learn Rails".