How to get my foot in the door for a dev job?

[Psilocybin]

I am a self-taught programmer, been coding for about a decade, but have never really made it more than a hobby. I consider myself very proficient with coding itself, but have no professional experience and no CS degree, so I'm unable to get my foot in the door. <br />
<br />
What are some tips for finding a part-time (preferably web development) job? Should I take some months off working on my portfolio (what I'm doing now), working a "regular" job till then, or are there better ways? <br />
<br />
What do employers look for when hiring a web developer (python, PHP, ruby, etc)?<br />

 

[CAT]

You could get a job without the degree, but it may limit your salary somewhat. So you have some nice examples of code that you've done? Do you know coding theory; are you ready to answer technical programming questions? They may ask you something like 'how would you determine whether a number is a multiple of two as efficiently as possible?''What kind of sort would you use for this data?' Have you written some large projects that you can describe on your resume?