[mechanical_fish]

One reason why patio11 suggests the whole "coffee" angle is that a coffee meeting is a better way to provide personalized advice. Otherwise we're reduced to playing HN Twenty Questions. ("Startup or not a startup? Bay Area or not Bay Area? Is your CV bigger than a breadbox?")

Having said that, "are you looking for your dream job in Zanesville, Ohio, or in SoMA?" is a fine entry in the Twenty Questions game. My own contributions would be:

A) "Could you put some contact information in your HN profile?"

B) "Can you describe something you've actually built? And if you haven't built anything yet, could you build something this week and send us the link to its Github page?"

But, of course, this is Twenty Questions, so either of these could turn out to be silly questions once we know the context.

[thaumasiotes]

(A) yes, I was bitten by the "your 'email' setting doesn't show" feature. It got me even though I'd been warned in the past. :(

(B) (1) This past week, as part of an interview, I've built a django project that provides text and video chat to logged-in users. This is, I would say, small-scale. (2) Some years ago, I wrote a quick scraper to download Peanuts archives from comics.com. The main thing I learned from that was that, years afterwards, I encountered the web page for Beautiful Soup and immediately understood what problem it was dealing with. I'd call the scraper tiny in scale. I'm not too sure what qualifies as a "project", but, as you guess, I haven't done much. (3) If you have hiring authority, or even if you just know someone who does, I'm happy to build something for you. I'm less happy to think of something to build myself. :/

As to the pre-questions, I don't have much of an opinion on startup vs non-startup, I'd prefer to be in the Bay Area, and my CV is, unfortunately, smaller than a breadbox. I'm apprehensive about moving somewhere just on spec; as a cousin post illustrates, that seems like a great way to exhaust all your cash and still not have a job. I'm only too happy to move for a job, since Santa Cruz could be charitably described as a "dead end".

Please, anyone, email me: username at gmail

[mechanical_fish]

I'm apprehensive about moving somewhere just on spec;

One can do this by couchsurfing. That was my technique, back when I was in your position. It needn't be expensive. Just don't wear out your welcome by staying on any particular couch for more than a week or so.

The fact that you're in Santa Cruz, though, makes me wonder if even the couch is strictly necessary.

Your projects sound just fine. (If that word sounds too highfalutin, call them "hacks" or "scripts". Whatever.) Put one or more of them on Github if you can. I have interviewed CS majors with good GPAs who had literally never built anything that they weren't assigned to build for a class, who had (e.g.) never deployed a page live on the web. The skills and disciplines required to build and ship things are largely orthogonal to what they teach in undergraduate school - it's like the difference between being an art historian and painting a portrait, or between having a Ph.D. in linguistics and delivering a lecture in Hungarian - so any chance you have to demonstrate them, even at small scale, adds depth to your qualifications.

I have no hiring authority at the moment (and am on the wrong coast, alas for both of us) but I'll give you this link to my colleagues:

http://www.acquia.com/careers/acquia-u

There's still plenty of work for Drupal developers, and PHP programmers in general, if you have (or can develop) the personality to deal with it. You will probably need a sense of humor. ;) It's not a great job for perfectionists. But it is a job where a little knowledge can go a long way. If you learn how to analyze queries and create strategic indices in MySQL, for example, people will think you're some species of wizard. The wizard bar is low.

Think of something to build yourself. It's a good thing to practice doing. Start small and develop the habit. Heed the words of Ira Glass:

http://youtu.be/BI23U7U2aUY