Good advice in other comments. If you are looking two years out you have a lot of time to get experience. The summary here is write code, learn about some existing open source projects, try to make some contributions, and work on your English communication skills.

1. Higher level English skills are really important, for both understanding the requirements and getting work. If you can read and write well enough to be on hacker news that might be a good indicator.

2. I have an impression that some frontend jobs are in higher demand in terms of numbers of jobs and maybe less technically demanding, might be better for beginner jobs. But frontend (ui) and backend are pretty different. I imagine frontend could take more personal interaction to adjust things, which emphasizes English skills even more.

3. Backend jobs are going to require more understanding of systems concepts (like OS, C++ and Java concepts); this is not a knock on UI, it's just different things are emphasized. There may be more opportunity to do longer duration work on backend.

4. You've got two years to build up your experience and resume. Programming contests look nice on a resume, try creative problem solving (i.e. maybe do a coding problem a day (or 2-3 a week), start on easy ones.

5. A lot of programming is looking at existing old and giant ugly code bases. Finding an existing open source project or two and making some pull requests to add new things is a great resume & experience building. This can be hard and time consuming though.

6. Your resume and experience will be crucial, that first job can be hard to get. Especially at the beginning think about what you get out of a job in terms of resume building, it's not just money and experience.

7. Ultimately, your ability to write code and read the code in existing systems are the things that will power your career.

8. Be professional. Don't get in flame wars on your public profile or github account, don't attack people's religion, race, ideology, country, gender, etc. If you don't understand something, ask questions, don't flame people. "Can you explain this (whatever thing), I don't understand the problem" goes a long way to establishing you will be a good person to work with.

Good luck! This is a lot of stuff, but you have two years, just work toward these things.

(edit - formatting)

What programming contests resources would you suggest?

Hi. I'm from Brazil and I just started getting web development freelance jobs recently. I think one of the most important factors is to have a good polished English. Check out the projects published on some platforms like Upwork or Freelancer.com. There's a lot of work on web dev like WordPress, PHP, JS. There's also courses on how to get freelancing jobs. I took a good one at Skillshare which helped me a lot to get my first job.

A great way to learn, I think, is trying to create a clone of an existing project. Example: try to build a clone of hackernewsletter: it needs a database, it needs a backend and it needs a frontend. You will have to understand database concepts, authentication (you need to register and login to be able to post), authorization (you can edit you own posts only) ecc.

Long-term, you may have a better career trajectory by getting a masters in somewhere like Germany, Sweden, Netherlands, the US, UK, Japan, etc. rather than jumping right into a job post-undergrad.

I'm from Kolkata, India. I started from college in 2006, got into open source, got well known in multiple circles, including Drupal.

Slowly I started getting contracts. Then I started building products and services business. I had opportunities come my way that people can't believe in my city.

The main issues I had for years was price. I didn't know to price myself out how to focus on money. But anyone can build an online presence and build a career. I've done that.

i'm learning vuejs. i figured that knowing a frontend framework along with a backend one (PHP, RAILS) is a good mix. plus i like the fact that vuejs is progressive so you can hook it into an existing site. something you can't do with react or angular (anymore).

From React's documentation:

If you are integrating React into an existing app, you may have as many isolated root DOM nodes as you like.

What am I missing?

[0] https://reactjs.org/docs/rendering-elements.html