Each section has a first pass time frame estimate, try to constrain yourself to only focusing for this amount of time before "shipping" and moving on to the next task. These time estimates do not represent a final version of any of these portions of your professional profile, just a first pass. It's important to make a profile and persona then update it and work on it over time. Time you spend with no presence is time that people won't know who they could be hiring!
Make sure that you have a picture of yourself, education, and job history on your LinkedIn profile. Even if you do not have any industry experience yet it is helpful for employers to know your background a bit. Give brief 2-4 sentence descriptions of what you did at each job, focus on transferable skills: did you manage people, did you have to learn to get a long, were you trusted with opening/closing which shows responsibility, etc.
LinkedIn has an "export to pdf" function (click on "MORE" in your profile then "Save to PDF"), while this isn't a 100% resume it will work for now If you go to a meetup or need to email employers this can be your working resume. You should never tell an employer "let me work on a resume" or delay responding because you don't have things put together. The simplicity of the LinkedIn export will work for most cases. Here make some small edits to your LinkedIn profile to make the PDF export better (lengthen or shorten descriptions, remove older jobs/education, etc).
Add your name, picture, city, email, and a short 1-2 sentence bio (ideally saying you're currently looking for jobs) to your GitHub profile. Clean up any empty repos, very small projects, or clutter from your repos (now you can mark these as private so you don't have to lose work you may want to make public later). Star 2-4 projects that you are actively working on and are proud of. Remove any projects that may be offensive or that have questionable content.
Using a template from something like https://wrapbootstrap.com/, https://startbootstrap.com/template-categories/portfolios/, https://themeforest.net/category/site-templates/creative/portfolio, etc or a site builder like http://webflow.io or https://www.squarespace.com create a portfolio from a template. Make very minimal changes to style and focus on filling in some content (replacing pictures, adding info about you, linking to projects on GitHub, adding project screenshots). Remove any unused sections or pages. Deploy to something like http://Surge.sh, GitHub pages, Netlify, or use the Site Builder's free hosting. The goal is to have a portfolio up with your projects and info as fast as possible and making it look reliable and somewhat professional. Be different with your bio and projects don't worry about the theme being the same as other people (remember your theme is the same as everyone that has no portfolio if you have no portfolio).
Using services like Heroku, GitHub Pages, and/or Netlify deploy 3 or more projects and make them available. You can use the free tier for all of these deployments, the important thing is that hiring managers and community members should be able to see your projects without needing to know how to deploy or installing anything on their computers (unless you are a native app developer then make sure your apps are available on Google Play or the Apple App Store). Once deployed to a site make sure there is data there for users to see and interact with, if it's an app that requires login create a demo user, if the app uses social media login add code to make sure the user will have data when they first log in (even if that is not ideal for a real application), the goal is that a user should not see a blank screen on your app. Next take updated screenshots of your projects and update your portfolio to include these screenshots.
Finally, in the GitHub repo for your projects write a short description of the project with a link to the deployed version of the project. Talk about what the goals of the project were, what you liked, what you learned, and possibly link to a few interesting parts of the codebase. If your app needs login then put the credentials for the demo user here on GitHub, make sure to check in occasionally to make sure there's no bad data in the demo user account (this includes garbage fake text, cursing, or other offensive material).
Too many job seekers stop coding on new things! Your portfolio and GitHub shouldn't show the last project you worked on was 6 months ago, and it shouldn't show you only worked on a single project for the last year. Try new experiments: follow tutorials and push the steps on your GitHub, try https://javascript30.com/, make small little apps to help you day to day, make a website for a party or your favorite game, make a fan project.
These projects don't have to be big huge things to add to your portfolio (they can be), but the point is to keep coding and keep trying new things. Show that you're interested and honing your craft. If you can, blog about your experiences along the way; did you learn something cool? make a post about it and share that knowledge! If you don't have a place to blog, use Gists like this and share them on social media and your portfolio!
A good way to get started is to do some smaller freelance projects. Keep things simple and manageable, if someone asks for a small website it's ok to use HTML & CSS and not use frameworks; do what's needed to get things done! Take on challenges: if you find a client that appreciates you, is paying, and gives you some freedom (both in trust and timeframe) then branch out to something a bit bigger and something you've not tried before; if you can maybe think of how to solve the problem you can do it!
Money can get tight, stress can build up, and tension to do paid work can be overwhelming at times.
Free or cheap jobs almost never worth doing.
They often lead to people devaluing your work and your time.
It's also very hard to turn a free or cheap job into productive time; when you get another paying job it's hard to tell someone who you did their site for free "you need to pay for more work".
Also, with free or cheap work the quality of client is often worse and the scope of projects are harder to nail down; usually someone who's paying $15/hour (or nothing) is not going to put much thought into what they need or how they want things done compared to someone paying
Make sure you have a contract for any work done. Specify what will be delivered, when, how, and importantly make sure that deployment and paying for services like AWS, Heroku, etc is done by the client! Make sure you can use any work you do for clients on your portfolio (at least as a screenshot). In the contract have language of how you and the client can leave. If possible get paid an hourly rate and invoice weekly, this reduces your strain since if a project breaks things off you've been paid for the work you've done and at most lose one or two weeks.
Don't let your GitHub or portfolio go too long without some touch ups. Did you do more projects, add a blog post, get a job? Take a few minutes and update GitHub, LinkedIn, your portfolio, etc.
Very nice! 👍 Thanks for this!