In regards to struggling to get interviews, Look for devs who have the job you want, start talking to them asking for advice, ask them for advice on what to le

In regards to struggling to get interviews, Look for devs who have the job you want, start talking to them asking for advice, ask them for advice on what to learn next, ask them to look over a personal project of yours for advice, i would also suggest you talk to someone about your resume, if you arent getting any hits with your resume, you need to improve it and some people are really good at providing advice here to make you look more appealing as a candidate despite your lack of 50 years of experience, you should be applying to lots of jobs on a daily basis. when i was job hunting i would spend half the day studying and half of the day applying to jobs. in regards to working for free: i would look for established companies' or open source library tutorials, look for bugs by completing the tutorials, look for low hanging fruit open issues that you are able to fix, fix them, thats your free work and you will learn in this process i made minor PRs on tutorials on oktas website, microsoft, and netlify,one big company said thats why they invited me to interview overbother candidates. Youll deal with lots of no's, but remember all you need is one yes, so just keep studying and improving in the meantime I transitioned from telemarketing into software development so i feel your pain :) Best of luck