This file is basically a brain dump of what I would do if I was looking for a job as a relativly new developer today.
There are tons of Meetups around, but it's important to sort through which are actually helpful and which are a waste of time. Personally, I've found that the more specific a Meetup is, the better it generally is in terms of useful content and potential networking. For example, I've gotten much more value out of the Chicago HTML5 meetup than I have the Chicago Web Professionals.
Networking at meetups is key. First, the company providing the meetup space is usually hiring (which is a big reason why they host developer meetups) and will often provide a pitch at the beginning. The person giving the pitch is the one you want to find after the talk if the openings sound interesting.
In addition, talking to other people at the meetup can lead to finding out about open positions as well. When I was helping out with hiring, I definitely looked closer at resumes of people I remembered meeting at a Meetup previously.
Outside of the networking aspect, Meetups are a great place to get exposed to technologies and new skills. The presentations themselves are usually great.
It's easy to get overwhelmed with all the different meetups, especially if you're in a bigger city. I'd encourage you to give as many a try as look interesting but if you go and aren't feeling the community, then cross that one off your list. I've gotten much more value from the Meetups I go to consistently rather than going to new ones every month.
Action Step: Go to Meetup.com, create an account, and pick two (2) Meetups that have presentations you'd be interested in for the next month.
As a relatively new developer, it's important to show what you know. The best way to do this is to have code online that people can look at. This can either be open source projects you've contributed to or code you've written yourself.
Contributing to open source doesn't have to be daunting and there a bunch of projects looking for beginners to contribute. Contributions don't have to be huge, but what's important is that it creates public evidence that you're someone who can get things done and work collaboratively with people.
See an example pull request that I contributed that was just 4 lines of CSS! Contributing to open source doesn't have to be complicated, but anyone who finds that now knows that I have some usable knowledge of Flexbox and that I consider both older and newer browsers when I'm writing code.
When you find a project that looks like a good fit for your skills, you can look for issues labeled good-first-bug, which are traditionally easier for first-time contributors.
More information about contributing to open source projects on github can be found here
Action Step: Find a project that you're interested in that matches your skill set with an issue tagged good-first-bug and take a shot at contributing.
If contributing to an existing project isn't your thing, consider putting together a quick prototype of a feature or an interaction and putting it on Codepen. These don't have to be complicated either. Just enough to show how you structure your code and how you think about solving front-end problems.
If you're stuck on what to build, find a website you visit frequently or enjoy and try to replicate that on your own without looking at their code.
Action Step: Build your first Codepen and share it with someone to get some feedback.
What used to be IRC channels in many cases have now moved to Slack teams. Many of these are organized around a specific technology, but some are also organized around geography.
For example, I'm a part of the WordPress Slack team, where everyone contributing to WordPress hangs out and talks about what they're working on and what's next for the software. This is great because the connections I have made in this group have translated to real-life and have helped me start to contribute to WordPress as well.
In addition to this, I'm also part of the Chicago Tech Slack team, which is focused around Chicago. One of the best resources is the #job-postings channel, which fills up with 2 or 3 posts per day of companies looking to hire. This is great because I know these jobs are near me (or even remote in some cases) and I already have that connection with whoever is hiring.
Action Step: Find a chat community (Slack or otherwise) around a technology that you're interested in or a project you use and join it. See if there is a chat community for your city or start one if it doesn't exist!