I was in a similar situation in 2007 having been out of programming work since the dot com bust in 2001. I got hired at a small startup where I happened to do w

I was in a similar situation in 2007 having been out of programming work since the dot com bust in 2001. I got hired at a small startup where I happened to do well on the interview - I aced a couple of brain teaser like interview questions and just happened to be a cultural and personal good fit with the interviewers. I then got to choose the front end framework for the company and chose ExtJS and that keyword on my resume got me headhunted into a major tech firm 6 months later. So pick some current hot tech stack/framework and get some experience with it even if you have to work on open source or pro bono for a bit.