Make stuff that you like and blog about it. That could be toy websites/demos, a game, tutorials for things or hardware projects. Anything. Post them here, post

Make stuff that you like and blog about it. That could be toy websites/demos, a game, tutorials for things or hardware projects. Anything. Post them here, post them on Reddit or Hackaday and bring people in to find them. Eventually you can get organic traffic from search engines if what you write is really useful. You can even make passive income this way throuh ads (beer money level, but it's nice to have - you can save till you're 21 anyway!). The most useful lesson I've learned, in my opinion, is to ignore what other people say you should do. Focus on what thrills you, the projects that will keep you up at night trying to complete. If you do that, I guarantee it'll work out for you. Contributing to open source is an admirable goal, but it's definitely a nice-to-have rather than a must. You have a Github portfolio, so build that out. Instead of picking some random project to help out, decide you like doing and fix what annoys you. I use OpenCV every day and my first open source PR (ever) was a documentation update, because something was poorly explained. The next one was a fix for some function that wasn't consistent with the rest of the codebase. These are very minor things, but I was personally invested in fixing them. However here's my advice right now: if you want money, find work locally. Ask around people you know, odds are you know someone who needs a website. Go around ask local companies (like, within a mile of where you live) if they have any jobs that need doing. Pull on your networking strings, don't prostitute yourself to freelancing websites. Don't limit yourself to advertised schemes. I have a physicist friend who emailed a random startup in Berlin that she liked (she lived in the UK at the time) and just asked if she could do some work for them, they said yes.