I'm happy for your eagerness to learn and wish you luck breaking out into this industry. There is a lot to say about the issue of "hiring" an unpaid contributo

I'm happy for your eagerness to learn and wish you luck breaking out into this industry. There is a lot to say about the issue of "hiring" an unpaid contributor, but one thing comes to mind before all else: open source contributions. Have you looked at all into contributing, either technically or via documentation, to open source projects? This has a few advantages over what you're trying to do: - You don't need to wait for anyone to reach out to you. - You contribute to the things you care about the most, whether it be web front ends, machine learning toolkits, or the latest PDF parser. - In my opinion, a resume that says "Contributor to X package <Github link>" is much stronger than one that says "unpaid contributions to a company". If you hadn't considered this before and want to give it a shot, feel free to post again asking for help getting started. Finally, don't worry about not being experienced enough to contribute to open source projects. Here's a recent post about a one-character pull request to MLflow: https://towardsdatascience.com/a-one-character-mlflow-pull-request-6d135437702d https://towardsdatascience.com/a-one-character-mlflow-pull-r... If that can get pulled into `main`, anything you're willing to contribute can!