33 yo, no professional experience in Web Development, no luck w/ applying for jobs

Your website “randykomforty.info” is just a redirect to your CodePen? I’d say that’s one thing you should change asap—create a website on that domain, instead of having it redirect to your CodePen.

It’s hard to provide specific advice without also seeing your resume, but I’m going to assume that you have work experience in another area?

Regardless, a brief scan of your CodePen doesn’t do a whole lot of favors for you—most of the people who use CodePen regularly are extremely talented at creating amazing effects, animations, and other visual stuff. CodePen is really more of a visual showcase for creative & artistic front-end devs than anything else—if you haven’t yet, you should hit CodePen’s main page to see the kind of stuff that most people are creating on there. Your pens really don’t seem to be the kind of thing that belongs on CodePen, as most of them could stand to benefit from some design improvement and aren’t very visual in nature either—CodePen is really more of a “whizbang visual/ graphics” repository than anything else.

If you’re applying for front-end developer positions, I’d recommend moving all of your stuff currently on CodePen to a more appropriate platform like either GitHub Pages or surge.sh. If you have any full-stack projects, put them on Heroku or Netlify. If you don’t already have a GitHub and LinkedIn profile, create those and fill them out.

Finally I’d say a key project to complete is a visually-amazing website or web app—i.e., something with a design & UI that will impress the average person. Way more people care about design & UI than your code (particularly companies and recruiters), which is why you have to focus on that. Ideally make a few of these websites/web apps. You can “create” your own work experience by offering to re-design the website that someone else might have. For your first website, this might have to be for free, but no one will have to know that—as long as you’re creating websites that look good and gaining experience, that could be what gets you in the door somewhere.

But you definitely have to get off CodePen—your work on there isn’t doing you any favors and belongs elsewhere. Plus if you’re a serious job applicant, most companies/recruiters expect to see both a LinkedIn and GitHub link, neither of which you’ve provided.

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