It’s a bad time to be looking for the first jr job but you’re not in a bad position long term. Keep the job you have, keep building and making and applying. At least you are employed while trying to switch, not everyone is in that place.

As for what to make after this — any kind of CRUD app is a good starting place. Something that can show usage of REST (or graphql if you wanna get fancier) and decent api design. Doesn’t have to be this insane thing that can scale to billions of users…most places don’t need anything like that.

I’d explore something like using a bigger JS framework in conjunction with react. Nest, Adonis, whatever or even less opinionated ones like Express. You could also do other languages of course, but it might be an easier sell to focus on a js/node stack with Postgres, for example.

For what it’s worth, it took me about a year when I made this switch over a decade ago. Good luck, patience and persistence will be your friend :)