My 2¢:

At this time I’d say you don’t necessarily want to be creating a portfolio of Elixir projects, if you have good skills here you’ll be able to establish it pretty quickly when you interview/talk to people.

I’d say you’d be better investing your time on learning an adjacent skill that is in high demand. E.g. if you can learn something around cloud infrastructure/AWS/devops, that’s a skill I still see in very high demand and I feel is likely to stay that way even through a recession.

Of course, take this with a pinch of salt, predicting the future is a tricky science But seeing something who has Elixir skills, vs someone who has Elixir + a bit of cloud would be a differentiator for me (and I’m am occasional hiring manager).

Well, this isn’t a job that would guarantee you money or necessarily be noticed, but it could possibly do both if you play your cards correctly. What I’m talking about is the Gnome Community Engagement Challenge, which you could possibly win up to $21,000 in cash for winning. The challenge is looking for people to propose and build events, applications, or really anything that can bolster community engagement and bring new contributors to the open-source world.

If you want to learn more about the challenge, then you should go to https://www.gnome.org/challenge/ to do so.