Put some good Ruby code on github. If you can, you'll improve your chances of getting hired quite a bit. If you can't then you're not ready to be hired yet.
I'm actually making a part of my transition plan to attend an intensive course like those offered by General Assembly and CodeFellows.org
Those programs are designed to give me plenty of opportunity to put up live projects and public code. I have some stuff now, but it's so messy and noob-tastic that I'm not showing it to anybody for fear of being put in the stocks. It's that bad. :/
First, working apps are big: put them on Heroku, link them up. I don't care how "straightforward" or "noob" they may seem, I want to know you're capable of shipping working products. If you can only get me 90% of the way to a solution, having to solve the last 10% for you on a regular basis makes you far less valuable to my team. Blog about the challenges or one interesting aspect of each of these projects: even 3 paragraphs can show me you know how to communicate technical things.
Second, GitHub all the things. Show that you know the "full stack": front-end markup, data modeling, a bit of jQuery can't hurt. HAML/SCSS are all the rage, not too difficult to pick up, and show you're "hip."
Third, go to Rails meetups: in Austin, we have a hacknight every Tuesday, and a monthly Rails meetup. If I've worked on a problem with you over a beer, your resume will naturally gravitate to the top when I have an opening.
All of those things are doable over weekends and evenings, and running with just these three tasks for 6 weeks would put you, in my experience, a hundred miles ahead of everybody else looking for a junior position.
Good luck man.
This is fantastic. If I'm ever in Austin, I'd be glad to buy you a drink!
More published code is better than less published code irrespective of quality, because it tells me that you're engaged and devoted to your craft, and it gives me a sense of what projects and technologies you're interested in and have been exposed to. Additionally, publishing code gives me a way to see your progression through the craft, and to get a sense of not only how developed you are as a programmer, but how you're growing.
A junior programmer who shows growth and improvement is a much better hire than a junior who is competent but shows no growth. When I hire people, I want to hire people who will grow into strong senior developers over their career, which means that I'm primarily looking for ability to learn and grow rather than a specific buzzword checklist. Hiring a junior comes with the expectation that I'm going to have to train and hand-hold them, but I want to hire a junior who will progress out of that stage, and will be able to start taking care of those things for new hires down the road.
Publishing code on Github doesn't mean that you're asking other people to use it; it just means you're publishing it. A Github profile on a resume is a +1 for me; a Github account with a lot of forks is another +1, an account with original code is yet another +1, and an account with original code that other people use is the big cherry on top. In all cases, though, I'd rather see an active account filled with "noobish" or "messy" code than an empty account.
> More published code is better than less published code irrespective of quality
This is the path I try to walk. I'd rather put something out there than nothing at all.
As an interviewer, I don't care that you've written bad code in the past (any developer who says he hasn't is lying). I do care that you have written code up to the standard of the job I'm hiring for (which is going to be quite lenient for a junior position), but I'm mostly going to be looking for cues demonstrating improvement and curiosity. The more technologies, languages, and concepts you touch, the better. To me, your Github profile is a showcase of your interests first and foremost.
I'm much less interested in hiring someone for their hard skills than I am for their potential. I can hire outsource hard skills for pennies on the dollar; what I want are people who can become proactive owners of the projects they're on, not just code monkeys who turn specs into code. For example, one guy I hired saw that we were looking for a dev with front-end chops, so he re-coded his resume with backbone.js just to show off a bit. This caught my attention, not because of his ability to write Javascript, but because his proactive solution to the question of "how do I get this company to hire me?" told me that he was the kind of person I wanted to work with, not just that he had a specific skillset that I could hire.