Here are some sources to help you practice your skills in the meantime and build up a great portfolio to impress future employers:
Know what tech is out there
Firstly you should be familiar with modern technologies, here’s a great tech ecosystem cheat sheet.
Practice doing coding assessments
If you want to get a job through a service like OfferZen or by interviewing at companies you'll need to be able to do really well in their coding assessments. This is why we have a coding assessment, to test if your skills are a fit for what companies are looking for. Some useful sites for practicing:
Learn interviewing techniques
You should also practice interviewing techniques and learn how to interview for coding positions. Here are some pretty good articles to help you improve your interviewing techniques:
Studying for a Tech Interview Sucks, so Here's a Cheat Sheet to Help - Good for common data structures and algorithm questions.
Interview Cake - great site for practicing your interviewing skills.
Get involved in coding communities
Use meetup.com to find local coding meetups and meet other programmers. Meetups are great as you can meet like-minded individuals, get insights into how they found work and what they do and learn about coding.
Build an online portfolio of your code and projects and get involved in open source projects. Github is a great service for storing and sharing your work.
Learn to use StackOverflow for solving problems, learning and connecting with other developers. Even better, if you can answer questions and solve other people's problems, this really improves your cred.
If you want to grow your knowledge of the programming and tech space, follow these sites:
Product Hunt - less programming related
Programming websites for beginners
Know what companies want
Educate yourself on what tech companies are currently doing and working with. A great place to find info about this is on our company list.
Know what you want
You should have a clear understanding of what tech you're interested in and what skills you can bring to the table. You'll find much better work if you lay out an action plan to build up and better showcase your portfolio and skills over the next 6 - 12 months.
See how other people did it