Work on your code portfolio. You should have your own site where you collect and publish work and ideas. Lots of people use GitHub for this too.
Keep your brain in shape by taking a course on Coursera or Udacity.
Go code. Open source. Port your first game to HTML5/canvas, just for the kicks. Pick up new language. Record a screencast of hello world of some technology you like. Port an algorithmically interesting code, eg a hashing function from some language to another. Start a blog. Do an interview with a few founders of recently announced startups about their technology stack, write about it. Get involved in hackernews discussions. There is so much to do!
Whether you get money or not, keep coding, keep creating, keep passionate about making bits dance. Job/money will come.
Most hiring managers at bigcorps aren't nearly so clueless, but a lot of them take a, how to put this, long-term view of things... and don't always know about from GitHub or SO, let alone what cachet they have in hacker communities.
So again, it can be a, let's not say perfectly viable, but viable-ish strategy to bank on one's commit history on GitHub, and other proxies like Stack Overflow... if you're content, and secure enough in your market value to stick to the 5% of the employers that value these kinds of markers very greatly.
But for the other 95%, not so much.