[goldenbeet]

In my experience there's two key pieces of landing a job that a lot of applicants don't put any emphasis on.

"Culture fit": In the startup world everyone is looking to hire people who fit their culture. They don't even necessarily have to know why they're doing it or what it ought to look like in an applicant, but they look for it anyways. So ways to make sure you're ticking this checkbox are making sure you're enthusiastic about coding and speak with excitement about what you're doing and the be excited about the company's core values. For example, most companies are consumer facing, so you need to get jazzed about providing the best user experience possible and be motivated by seeing people use your product and interacting with users and their feedback. The best advice I could give here is to make sure you do your research on the company, tailor your resume/cover letter/responses to match them, and just fake it till you make it.

Personal Projects: The other piece that applicants tend to not have (particularly people just entering the field) is solid portfolio work. One key aspect of that is open source contributions. Get excited by a framework or a library and not only become an expert on it, but get involved in the developer community and start contributing to the project on Github. The other important piece is projects that are real. Something that is original and actually solves a problem, something that people outside of your circle have used. Everyone and their mother has class assignment projects or online tutorial walkthroughs (kanbans, todo list, simple fetch from api and display, personal website). Only a very small fraction of people coming out of college or a bootcamp have a project that goes beyond the basics and teeters on being an actual product.

So my advice is to put more emphasis on those two aspects, make sure you're getting involved in the community online and in person via meetups (referrals are gold and trump just about anything), and avoid shotgunning for interviews (pick a few companies and focus on them).