I am currently working at Cisco Software development and I want to move to application development. My current work experience is 5+ years and I do not want to work in systems. I am doing leet code for interviews but most calls I get are for network/system dev. I feel stuck and would really appreciate suggestions. Thanks in advance
What kind of app dev?
I wanted to work with cloud technologies and learn about containers. I work with C and low-level platform-specific cards. I am still exploring, but the end goal is to move away from hardware.
Take courses from Udemy on modern cloud stack and do side projects e.g build a Kubernetes cluster and have an app deployed to cloud. Many cloud providers have free credits and you can spin instances easily. Other approach would be to checkout some recent successful open source projects. Understand the architecture. Many of those open source projects have public git repo with issues tagged. You can start doing low hanging bug fixes and then move up.
Do some side projects and build your own apps to show that you can build apps.