Ask HN: How to get web development career on track from being homeless?
I am the homelessdev poster from CO. pxdHomelessDev reached out to me for an update which I gave him, but here&#x27;s a more detailed run down of what I did to start getting out of my situation.<p>I was able to avoid becoming homeless by using services the city offers (food stamps, a one shot service that helped with rent during the month it mattered most, unemployment until it ran out), borrowing a small amount of money from family, wife was able to get a part-time job -- this got us out of our immediate scenario of living on the streets or in a car but we were literally 1 week away from that happening.<p>Finally after months of applying for jobs I was able to land one a week ago.<p>What I have done to get back on track:<p>1. put together a good portfolio: i built a few react sites, made some 2d games and converted a few interesting problems found on hackerrank into little applications so that I would have some diverse projects to show off. created social media accounts to showcase my work as well and linked all of those from my portfolio site.<p>2. prepared mentally: with each job interview that I failed I paid close attention to what went wrong and what I could have done to prevent it from failing and then adjusted my next interview based on that information.<p>3. put in 15 resumes per day: there are lots of job sites (angel.co weworkremotely.com and remoteok.io to name a few) -- once i ramped up to 15 resumes a day I had at least 3 calls a week with prospective employers. I also didn&#x27;t limit myself to CO -- i now have a remote job.<p>4. don&#x27;t kill yourself or give up: for me this was the hardest part of the process. i suffer from bipolar disorder and was on the verge of suicide for the better part of this year. each failure during the process made me sink further into depression, though keeping my mind occupied with my own projects helped immensely. staying positive through this sort of thing, even if you&#x27;re lying to yourself and faking it, seems to be one of the keys to success because other people can pick up on your mood.<p>---<p>I am assuming that you have very limited funds and thus might not know where to host a website for cheap -- this can be accomplished for 1 or 2 USD per month on AWS using a serverless infrastructure. You can also host free static sites on github pages with custom domains (get one on namecheap for $9 per year). Whatever you choose has the added benefit of being something you can talk about in a job interview and showcase on your site.<p>---<p>i don&#x27;t know how your javascript skills are, but if you have extensive front end experience:<p>1. update your knowledge if need be to the latest JS syntax<p>2. spend a weekend learning react<p>3. start playing with node<p>javascript is in demand and i have seen Jr devs (1 or 2 years of react and node experience) being billed as either &quot;fullstack developers&quot; or even worse &quot;senior fullstack developers&quot;. With your current skill set and a bit more knowledge you should be able to land a JS job pretty quickly.