There is of course no guarantee of anything. But I know a lot of people are probably in similar situations. I would be grateful for any responses.

Recession makes me feel like any short term options will likely fail. I believe Hacker News has some of the brightest minds, better than reddit, and I could use some input.

I graduated 2-year CS, had 1 month contract work that ended January 2021 from a company at a meetup.

Realizing in person was mostly dead, I did 100 days of code challenge to improve image and built several portfolio of apps in JS technologies (React, Node, Next.js). Put in about 100 applications the past year, had about 4 serious interviews where they were interested, but of late no bites. Even tried weekend building apps in specific stacks and emailing.

The job process and be grueling, resume keyword searches, different companies looking for different things in different technologies. So I'm kind of sitting here about a couple years later, or a year after the challenge.

A lot of local companies are only looking for senior .NET devs in this area, so thats not ideal. I have some vague brainstormed ideas what to try or how to improve. Maybe AWS certification + apply driving to towns for interviews, maybe more education or paid portfolio reviews

I could try to build profitable apps, like do gamedev or bug bounty, but that takes a lot of time, and is harder to do without base level income, especially in recession.

Heroku going paid only recently knocked some of it offline, gotta revamp that. So I'm kind of staring at my portfolio thinking Now what. I obviously need to go through some kind of improvement cycle, but how or what, what narrative? I'm going to have to make a decision soon how to tackle this, trying to make the wise one.

How do you decide what to do next, making a reasonable action plan? The recession scaring anyone else, advice?