So much of any job is the discipline to do boring but important routine tasks. You will probably not be fortunate enough to find interesting and challenging thi

So much of any job is the discipline to do boring but important routine tasks. You will probably not be fortunate enough to find interesting and challenging things to work on, especially at the start. If you can have the discipline to show how you create tic tac toe, or connect 4, or some simple crud app that stores contacts or whatever, you can show that you can complete work. And you can talk about the choices you made, why your code is good or maintainable or performs well. Motivating yourself to work is not something that comes easily to everybody, but you have to show that you can do that even more so when you plan to work remotely. You can also try implementing the same thing in different ways - like tic tac toe in vanilla JS and react - and discuss the tradeoffs between managing state in both contexts. But anything that shows you n engaging with the practical work of programming will surely help you out. If you need a team, you might have to get out of your comfort zone and find some civic having events in your city if they have those. There you will find problems and teams. If you can't bring yourself to go, email the organizers or get on their slack and see if your skills match any problems that people are working on.