1) While you search, you might start contributing to bigger open source projects that have visibility. It shows you can be part of a team. Then you also have "references" that can vouch for you; your employers can see your work directly.
2) Try thinking of your professional identity; how do you market yourself. This is a combination of your skills and interests in terms of what types of projects you want to work on and want to be called upon. What do you want to be known for?
Truthfully, your biggest asset right now will probably be that you have some skills (don't have to be trained from zero), and are super cheap and willing to do more than you get paid for.
The best way would probably be to expose your work by contributing to open-source projects. You can either start your own project if you have an idea of something that could be useful to others, or join an existing project.
Which is an excellent additional point. Start trying to help open source projects. There’s a huge ecosystem of projects needing all kinds of help at every level of technical and programming experience from just above none to mythical 10x gurus.
By pitching in with an existing project you can legitimately help them and simultaneously be much more employable since it shows you can work in a team and work on that kind of software, the extra bonus is that by helping a larger project prospective employers are more likely to have heard of the project your contributing to.
Edit: This is more of a general advice to novices take. Since you’re clearly already doing this sort of reputation building work.
If possible, choose a large/well organised Open Source project which already has good documentation and people working on it.
That way you get involved with a team of people who should (in theory) already be following good practises, should have a sensible tool chain, and have habits you can learn from. And you'll make good contacts/references/potentially be hired.
(if you're looking to get hired as a potential result, choose a project that has backers with $$$ that hire from the Community :>)
I think this is really hard to pull off. Your best chance is to work on some project that will show off your skills, even if it is your own side project and then proactively contact companies.
Open source projects might be a good idea because there you'll be working together with other professionals that might recommend you if you make a good impression.
Oh and if you do go build awesome open source work, the best way to get attention is to do it inside a FAANG company & to release a corporate blog post on it. You'll have many orders of magnitude more attention & interest in your project, if comes from a tech giant.
1. Design and Build a project. Add it to Github, and commit to the main branch as you go. This makes it open source.
2. Once done (or while you build it), make a web portfolio which includes a description page and even demo of your project
Recipe for improving skills:
- study video tutorials (and code along) via udemy.com
- roadmap.sh for ideas
- libgen.is for free books
- chat rooms like IRC, Discord, Slack (google "discord channel for <thing that interests you-- such as Django, Flask, or another framework or a language>" -- substitute Discord for IRC and see those options)
I didnt have a CS degree. I taught myself full stack dev skills, then built something, then published a website about it. I used it to land my first 100% programmer job.
Also, prior to that 100% programmer job, I was a "business analyst" which involved some scripting. To get that role, I had to move states-- from the South over to California (San Jose area). I literally camped out for a month, then rented a room for a month-- until I landed my first job, then started renting a studio-- about 2 months in to my stay.
It's not necessarily the easiest path, but it's doable for some, depending on various factors.
It would need to be a fairly high profile open source project, one that would attract the attention of recruiters. Of course, you'd be compared against the other high profile contributors to it, but what better way to show you can do it?
There are other ways to raise one's profile. One could join the C++ Standard committee and actively participate in it. The top C++ companies will notice you. Or the standards committee of your favorite language.
One can submit papers to relevant conferences. Companies often attend conferences for the specific purpose of recruiting.
Even better, you can do the above without needing to relocate, and with minimal investment of funds.
The problem is that many projects are high-profile (and therefore will have many developers). I want to taret something that could use some help but doesn't necessarily have good developer coverage.
You don't. In the grand scheme of things, it's probably a small minority of people that go public (i.e. publicly posting on the Internet) with their ideas for an app or business.
To answer your question in terms of code projects, I tend to turn to GitHub. More often than not, if I'm trying to build something and I've hit a problem a few selective searches through the code section will bring up something similar. It might be in a different language, but it's helpful nonetheless.
Create some open source projects in the field you are interested in! This is a great way to demonstrate that you know what you're doing, especially if others are using your project and collaborating with you. When I interview people I always look at their GitHub and dig into their work. Just make sure that your code has tests and has ok documentation.
Bonus: if one of them gets popular you'll have companies coming to you.
Not necessarily the top projects, but rather the most visible in each area. For example, if you are going to try building an app in Ruby, then there will be a bunch of things you will use to build that app. Most of those things will probably be on Github. Those are the projects to watch and perhaps contribute to.
Establish yourself as an authority, or at least create some visibility for yourself. Again, you do this by writing code, publishing code, writing articles, meeting people, etc. Another way to do this would be to make a name for yourself in less mature but trending areas. For example, NodeJS is very new and there are a lot of problems which still need to be solved in that ecosystem. Pick a problem, run with it and then if you can nail it then you have just established some authority for yourself. Keep building up this profile and you will have no problems landing work.
I got lucky and transitioned (in the same company) to a search project from CRUD - which I find vastly more interesting.
But my advice is to pick hard problems yourself and try to solve them. You need to start somewhere! Sure its expensive to get your hands on driving car hardware, but there are plenty of hard problems out there that need solving and can be done using opensource and your personal computer.
If you are able to get yourself through a really tough problem, you will come out better on the other side - even if it takes you years to solve.
Start an open source project. Look for a problem and create a solution for it that is better than alternative solutions. Work with contributors, to build something that is useful to others.. You'll be surprised how much real world experience you'll gain.
most of the exposure you’ll be getting is from organic search
you might not realize, but people are literally searching for solutions all the time
companies also search for projects they want to build/use to see who’s already building it (this is where you can get hired)
so, a good idea would be to work on your README so when your prospects describe the problem to the search engine your project comes up as a solution
then make sure the technical side and the documentation are solid, so that people can depend on it
a plus for you would be to have projects across multiple domains, this increases your exposure
if you want to go a step beyond that, try to post your projects to relevant communities (note: this should come secondary after search)
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