How do I go front being a Jr. front-end developer to a software developer?

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You should get clearer about what kind of work you want to do. Building progressive web apps is very different than building desktop apps. The good news is that there’s a serious dearth of good talent. There’s a good bet that if you just decided what you wanted to work on, then picked out job ads to respond to based on that, you could find yourself getting paid very well to do that without ever having done it at all. There’s been such an explosion in technologies that no company can reasonably expect to find the perfect candidate anymore, so they just look for bright people who they think can learn on the job.

One year professional front-end experience + side projects doing what you want to be doing should be plenty to get a job. You can learn on the job, but you will stand out if you actually have used the technologies they’re using before. The new hotness right now is React. You should be able to get a better job right now if you can use it at all.

I pitched myself to my current job as a Rails coder, which I have a lot of experience with. They had a sample project they wanted me to build. I knocked it out, and then a week later they asked me to do the same thing with React. Having never used React before I plugged maybe five hours into learning enough React to satisfy the requirements. I now help maintain www.greatbigstory.com