I am reaching out to this community because I am getting in financial trouble as time passes.
I have 7 years of experience in startup companies. Started in Frontend, moved to full-stack and eventually devops and SRE sprinkled with dev over the last 5 years.
Almost 2 years ago now I got fired. Company lacked money and I took this opportunity to focus on my passion for financial markets. Made some algos, money comes and goes, slightly profitable but nothing that would justify continuing without a job.
After a year of unemployment I tried to get back into the job market.
Resume details what I have been doing on my own. Some C#, some JS clients and some other tools that I use daily account management, market analysis etc... I explain it in every cover letter.
Couldn't find anything in the first 6 months so I made a website related to what I do to show my skills. Everything is online (cloud provider terraform), monitored (Prometheus, Grafana, the usual), CI/CD, basic security configs (cloudflare, ingress, vulnerability scans etc...). I can show all this. But I still cannot get a single interview.
My question is simple: What can I do to improve my results?
I understand that now almost 2 years without a job is bad. I have already lowered my salary expectations in every application I submit. But I cannot think that I ended my career just because I took time off to focus on something else.
A detail: I cannot reach to my network as I moved out of Europe and none of my friends/ex-colleagues seem to hire outside of EU right now. I am in the APAC region.
Thank you for your help.