Contribute to open source software projects to build your portfolio and build connections to other developers.
As a software developer it is important to have a catalog of work that shows your true potential and ability to contribute to existing codebases. What better way to show off your skill than by making contributions to open source software that we use all the time (such as NPM modules).
Your job is to choose several existing issues from a project of your choosing that you can complete within the week (feel free to search resources for inspiration). And then fork the repo, set the artifact, create a README.md detailing the issues, finish the issues and submit PRs for review.