[MsgingABottle]

The bootcamp focused on JS; I've been dabbling with Python, C#, Elm, and Haskell. That's a great idea; I actually poked into it a bit a couple months ago, but had trouble finding projects with issues that were approachable. Is there a resource for looking up suitable projects, or am I best off going to projects I know about and bouncing from there?

[galdosdi]

Don't explicitly go looking for open source projects to contribute to. That never worked for me at least.

Instead, let them come to you. Just do whatever coding you'd otherwise do, for fun or pay, and focus on that. But, while doing it, see if you notice something that annoys you about some library.

Any behavior you have to work around, or just a nice to have feature. Or even any time you wonder how a feature of a library you use is implemented (maybe the documentation is vague), jump in and read the source. And now you have an open source project to contribute to, almost as if by accident.

(You could do this for any tool or platform you use too, but libraries are nice for this IMHO because sometimes they're small, and they're in the same programming language you're already used to. Jumping into, say, your operating system can be much more intimidating than into a library you already use in a language you already know that really just does one small specialized thing)

[amorphid]

When I was a fresh programmer at age 39 in San Francisco, I found it very difficult to get a job, too. The trick that worked for me was posting my resume on Dice.com and saying "willing to relocate". A recruiter in Washington, DC noticed me. I interviewed remotely, got the job, moved to DC, got some experience, and later moved back to SF. Don't be afraid to do what you gotta do.

If you do consider the relocation route, I recommend trying to pick a city with a fair number of tech jobs and shortage of local candidates. In SF, I was competing against many, many entry level developers. In DC, there weren't that many.