Need some advice: I'm losing confidence trying to find a job as a Jr Rails dev.

I graduated months ago with a non-computer science degree but spent the latter half of university diving into Rails, Vim, Linux, and other peripheral technologies. I'm comfortable (at varying degrees) with the menagerie of tools/tech that comes with the space from Haml to Sass to SQL.

But I'm confident in my ability to make any conventional app with Rails.

I'm having trouble cajoling employers, though. My Github only has a couple trivial Rails apps. I have a meager blog. I can answer questions on #rubyonrails all day, but it's hard to represent my knowledge to employers. Or maybe it's just not enough.

Having found HN around the time I decided to jump into web development a few years ago, I became complacent with the amount of times I hear people say that there aren't enough Rails developers to go around. I felt like I was getting a head start by learning Rails during uni. But I forgot to consider that I'm hearing this on HN, a community that's probably predominantly based around the bay area.

I live in Texas and haven't had much luck finding many Rails jobs to begin with. I started off with an asking salary of 70k due to the aforementioned complacency. It's amusingly high, but I promise it's not the Dunning-Kruger effect in action. :) I just had no idea how to answer "What's your salary requirement?" Especially when I'd accept an offer $20k+ below that. What also led to my overestimation was that my friends with the same degree were getting into Microsoft shop consultancies and product companies around the $70k mark, but none of them had any experience outside the few trivial ASP.NET projects we had along our degree plan. None of them had side projects, programmed/made something for fun, or even knew much HTML. I thought surely I had more going for me than just being a new grad.

I've since dropped it to $50k, but am now lowering it to $40k in future interviews since it's evident that I need to just get my foot in the door.

Time is running out. It's been 5 months since I graduated. My parents resent that I didn't recruit heavily as I was graduating, but the recruited positions like "Business Process Analyst" and "Financial Management Trainee" (and much of the business school at large) were at odds with what I want to do with my life and the personality traits that make me enjoy the atmosphere around HN, Rails, and budding communities like Nodejs. I'll admit I was a bit drunk with confidence in my ability to find a Rails job at the time. Any job!

I'm not really sure where to go from here. I don't have the budget to move to the west coast or anywhere else at the moment. But I also understand I'm an unproven junior developer with no professional Rails experience. Only a very small subset of companies would fly out such a candidate. I certainly don't blame anybody for not taking a chance on me after a phone interview!

I think getting an unrelated corporate job just to get a job would be a bad idea for me. I enjoy working on my side projects. I have a few more interviews within the next two weeks, but I now see myself working a more menial job to pay the bills/debt while I continue to develop my side projects.

However, I'm approaching my mid-20s and I'm reluctant to believe that scavenging for free time to work on side projects is going to ever allow me to compete with other job candidates.