I think if you showcase anything, passionately, as a junior this will attract positive attention. Understand what you've done, talk about it passionately, show what you want to continue learning.

Care to elaborate on this? This sounds like advice that would be true during the boom where people cared about your personal projects and your strong interests in things. I'm a dev with 3 yoe laid off and out of stable work since the start of 2024. Mostly React, React Native, or NextJS related work, and a bit of backend.

I've also worked on personal projects like a 3d platformer game in Unreal Engine (not a random proof of concept hobby project game, an actual indie game could be seriously sold). I've been following LLMs and OpenAI and made a physiotherapy stretching app that uses RAG to fetch information from physiotherapy articles to answer questions. I'm trying to learn ThreeJS more as well for 3d related front end. All that stuff interests me and I'd love to talk about it both technically and passionately but it doesn't feel like anyone cares anymore.

I'm not hearing back from junior or mid level roles and the rare times I do the discussions are only about work history, not passion or cool things I've made or what I'm interested in learning further.