[hosh]

I know this option isn’t the best, but check out rentacoder or freelancer. You’re going to get underpaid, and competing with lowest-cost vendors. This is contract, 1099 work, so no employee benefits. (But! If you play your cards right and understand taxes and laws, it can be more lucrative).

However, what you have going for you is that you can speak and write English well. You do not have to (and should not mention) where you live, or your own circumstance. Most people are looking for someone cheap to do short projects.

The goal here is to bootstrap your experience with paid projects, even if the pay is low. You use that to then get in front of larger projects or part time work.

Pick a tech platform or a platform family and stick with it, at least initially. You’re looking for projects that, after completing them, will get you in the door with stuff that pays well.

Anything that you develop that you can put into github, you should. Usuallly, contracts are done as work-for-hire. You might be able to negotiate keeping copyright. You might not. However, tools and scripts you write to assist with it should get posted. Your hobby projects should go there too.

Now, to talk specifically about your strengths. If you love teaching and you are good at writing, one thing you can do is to start blogging about your projects, or writing tutorials. It is a kind of psychological or marketing jujutsu. Teaching something implies expertise and authority, so long as the content is competent. You can even frame this as documenting your experience learning something. Just make sure that you brand this as you authoring the thing.

Last, give some thought to speciality. If you are known to be able to solve problems in specific areas, people come to you. Some people write web apps. Some people do devops/sre/infrastructure. Some people write low latency multiplayer game servers.

[karaterobot]

OP, this is the most realistic advice for your very short time frame.

Take on a freelance contract and kick butt on it while simultaneously looking for the next contract. Eventually you will will either get offered a position by one of your clients, or you'll have enough of a resume to start applying in other places (or you'll like freelancing enough to stick with it).

[tkgally]

I was going to suggest the same thing: While continuing to look for steady work, see if you can get freelance jobs through any of the online boards. I started out as a freelancer thirty-five years ago (in another industry) and I’m happy I did: though I now work for a salary, that freelancing experience laid the foundation for my current career. And freelancing remotely is much easier now than it was thirty-five years ago.

A couple of years ago, I farmed out some small web design, programming, and proofreading jobs through Fiverr. The price competition among the people who bid for the jobs was brutal—people were bidding from some of the lowest-income countries in the world and seemed desperate for work—but it soon became clear that I would just be wasting my time if I went with the lowest bidders. Your writing skills will do a lot to attract jobs at decent pay. Good luck!

[hosh]

(So don’t just do documentation pull requests. Blog about the project itself, why you like it, help promote it, write a short tutorial about it on your own blog.)