Cold contacts with companies almost always fail. Unless its a small company, you will have to win at buzz-word bingo to get through those systems. And even then

Cold contacts with companies almost always fail. Unless its a small company, you will have to win at buzz-word bingo to get through those systems. And even then, it is rare to hear anything. Hiring absolutely s,ows down in the summer. Just getting all the people who will be involved in resume reviews and interviews in the office at the same time in the summer is hard. Can't help on the J2EE experience much. When I was hiring Java developers five years ago, it would have made no difference to me, but times may be different. Jersey for web services. Java persistence for DB access (Hibernate is a good proxy for that). Spring for dependency injection. I haven't done web UI stuff in Java for a long time, so I can't help there. Github-type projects can make a difference, depending on the company. Many want care; some it will be a deciding factor. It will never hurt, though. I would probably choose contributing to an existing project that has a lot of people involved. That gives you another networking opportunity with people who can see your capabilities. Language and technology user group meetings are also a solid choice. They tend to have a small core of regulars and a larger group of some combination of job seekers and people who are hiring. I've also found the "Who's Hiring" posts here to be useful. By far the most useful job postings I've found. Good luck!