I see a lot of comments here and a lot do mention working on your own projects while seeking a job. Unfortunately, I do understand you need/want an income (I wa

I see a lot of comments here and a lot do mention working on your own projects while seeking a job. Unfortunately, I do understand you need/want an income (I was in the same boat when I started in tech) and have financial obligations so you need to make money. I went to a coding boot camp to learn Ruby on rails and while I was the best in my class I couldn't land a role mainly due to no college and lack of experience. I did land some project work and a few roles but none lasted longer than a month or so because they weren't hiring me for a full time role but more contract related work. It still wasn't enough to get hired anywhere. The BEST advice I can give you is to make a real world project to send to potential employers. Show you have what it takes from wireframe to MVP and beyond. Show the process. You can do this all via git and commits and PR's. -Create the readme with the wireframe and photos of whiteboard if that's your thing. -Create the project and keep track of all progress via PR's and explain your logic and reasoning for decisions. -Once your at a place where your at MVP show the release process in your readme. -Once at MVP make sure you focus on performance and track the changes you make in PR's. This will let employers know you can work on a real project with real value and understand how pieces fit together way past writing small feature code. This needs to be beyond the skill level of your project work in school. I WISH I would have known this when I got into tech. I now work as an SRE and still code a rails web app but not for my day job. I see a ton of listings wanting cloud experience along side the dev work. I think its very important to know. For example my rails app uses S3 for hosting tons of images. I not only know AWS as I use it daily in my day job but know it well enough to utilize it in my rails app and make the most of it. S3 is a simple example but you get the idea. You can also play with release processes and pipelines and have a solid release plan for your work so that employers see okay the application not only can code a project from start to MVP and beyond BUT you can also get it out in the world. If your project makes sense to containerize into micro services then use Kubernetes. Use ArgoCD or similiar to deploy it, etc...Be able to roll back the app and have that built into the functionality that roll backs are possible. Have a DR plan and especially around data integrity not just infra. Use terraform (infra as code), etc...A lot you can do to really impress employers. I really wish you the best of luck and don't give up. If you have to get another role that's not what you want until you can get hired as a dev do it but don't give up on the dev side. Hopefully my advice helps. If your curious about my transition from a wanna be dev to SRE I was told that the world needed more infrastructure guys and I happened to be a Linux nerd in high school so I learned cloud online (linux academy but its now a cloud guru) in a few months and was able to land my first role. I was able to prove via code (terraform and an entire release process) in git for a sample app that I had what it takes to do the job.