[simonh]

Couldn’t agree more, and this isn’t exclusive to any of the other advice given here.

The son of a friend graduated from a CS degree last year and still doesn’t have a job. I told him if he wants to be a software developer, then he should just develop software, and showed him some scripts and games i’d written in Pythonista on my phone. Nobody has to give you permission. High quality dev frameworks can be got for free. You can run web apps on a free tier on Google or AWS web hosting. Developing mobile apps is easy these days and dev accounts with Google or Apple are very affordable. Get a GitHub account for your projects and build up some rep on Stack Overflow. You don’t even need to do anything super fancy or commercial, just interesting or fun or novel and demonstrate an understanding of a range of technologies. Put links to all of these on your resume.

Set yourself objectives. 4 months to get a web app running on Google App Engine (you can get a tutorial app working in an afternoon!). A month to figure out Github and upload it, and do this for future projects. 2 months to port it to AWS. 4 months to get an app into the Play Store, or App Store. All this can be done in spare time, half the time following tutorials and the rest on whatever your apps do.