Github projects are not as important as people might think. They are a plus, for sure, but not the meat -- unless you are a legendary open source contributor, but then you wouldn't have problems finding good work anyway.
I'd say build a non trivial, non toy project, from scratch. No need to be novel or groundbreaking. Something that really works and is not just the fun part. That is, both functionality and design must be professionally looking, it must feel thought-out, polished. It doesn't matter if your code is a masterpiece if the product looks like hacked together over a weekend. _Then_ use that as portfolio, independently if the source code is available at Github or not. People really like to see you can deliver a finished product.
I'll skip the details about resume and interview tips. There are plenty of resources out there.
The design is not "professional looking", but I don't know how to do "design". I've never been good at GUI work. I studied electronic engineering, but moved into software because I can't go to America to work and nobody outside Silicon Valley is designing chips.
Marketing is a huge problem for me too. Every time I tell people about my program, they basically ignore it. There's a company that's doing a very similar thing to study English (VoiceTube) and I had a nice Skype call with their CEO, but nothing's come of it.
It really seems like the industry is rigged to support artists and con-men, while people who actually write code are basically ignored.
Not just that, but remember not everybody can afford health care in US, so it's not unfathomable to think some of those bad statistics is due to people not being able to afford proper care, not just that they don't live a healthy life (which can certainly contribute to that).
Disabling Javascript has singlehandedly fixed several annoyances I had, even with ad blocking. No more tabs draining my battery (ok, css animations are still a problem), no more things jumping around, no more page popups, no more Intercom chat windows from people eager to talk to me, no more 3rd party crap Javascript tracking me (ublock prevented them already, but it's nice to know there's no way they can bypass adblock). Things load and render fast.
Some pages still require Javascript, and SSO is usually a pain, but for those cases I have a Chrome profile with Javascript enabled and a simple Hammerspoon script that launches that profile in incognito mode for the url I have on my clipboard.
>> Your notice of insecure password and/or log-in automatically appearing on the log-in for my website, Oil and Gas International is not wanted and was put there without our permission. Please remove it immediately. We have our own security system and it has never been breached in more than 15 years. Your notice is causing concern by our subscribers and is detrimental to our business.
Oh my... HTTPS was already well established 15 years ago... are people like this in charge of nuclear facilities, too?
Not sure if the linked extension would work without JS, though.