Ask HN: Help me get out of teaching and into software

I've been reading people's year end posts about what they've accomplished or learned in 2017 and it's really inspired me to take concrete action towards a long term goal of mine. I'm a primary school teacher but I taught myself to code many years ago - I bought a palm pilot in 2000 and started writing little shareware apps for it. I've been building side projects (mostly websites) ever since. I'd love to work full-time as a web developer.

I'm proficient in rails and php. I'm also learning js and vue . Over the years I've applied for several (remote) positions but I never get to the interview stage. From a quick scan of my inbox, it's mostly because I lack professional experience (8 companies). 2 companies turned me down due to lack of open source contributions (although I shared some code from side projects) and 1 company asked me to do a coding test but then turned me down because they didn't like my solution (it was a simple string manipulation and I wrote a simple method - they'd have preferred it if I wrote a new String class). There are also many companies I've applied to who never bothered to write back. All the roles I've applied for have been junior level.

Does anyone have any concrete, actionable advice that I can take to improve my chances of getting interviewed and hopefully hired?

Thanks in advance

Invest some time in exploring your existing relationships and building new ones with like minds. Some actionable steps might be:

- Explore Facebook for friends in the industry (or a friend of a friend) and ask for an introduction

- Attend relevant Meetup groups and events

- Contribute to an open source project that you find interesting

- Get a non-programming job and pivot within the company

Thousands of people like yourself are all trying to do the same thing right now, so the "who you know" is becoming increasingly important.

Could you build similar apps but targeted at iOS or Android?

> My problem is I can't seem to find a problem to solve that people would pay for.

Hmm, there is a lot of software by lone wolf developers or very small companies that sells - and quite well in some cases. I can think of half a dozen examples off the top of my head. I had a friend who started a business writing software teaching maths to primary school kids. He wrote games with a maths learning element using PureBasic on Windows. He did very well out of it from what I remember. You could look at apps like Ulysses which has gone from a lone wolf app to a small software company and makes a lot of money. "The Journal" still sells like hotcakes but is Windows only and looks a bit long in the tooth now. You don't necessarily need to do something complete new - just different.