I know that applying on jobs pages is not popular here on HN but, well, sometimes it works. In my opinion, having some projects on GitHub certainly helps, even if they are just hobby projects with no use in real world. So it doesn't mean that you must spend months working on open source projects on the evenings and weekends, hoping to get noticed. Same for technical blog posts. It definitely provides more signal to the person who is reviewing your application.

Also, very few companies are 100% remote, and making remote team work is not trivial, so it's important to ask the right questions when interviewing. Don't forget that's it is a two way street! Personally, I was looking for these two key things:

- at least ~30% engineers should be remote;

- there should be a strong culture of written async communication.

Once I discovered a company which I found interesting ( https://heapanalytics.com ), checked the jobs page, noticed that they are hiring remotely and just applied a few months later. Had several interviews over video chat / slack, no white board coding or CS trivia. In the end it worked out and I got an offer. Totally recommend applying at Heap - we are doing cool and challenging technical things (querying hundreds of TBs of data in seconds and making it reliable), the interview process is great and our small distributed remote team is made up of engineers from 4 continents, from North America to Australia!