I think those are the best possible thing you can do to get employed. I recommend to everyone I meet - teach yourself to code, build a few things of increasing complexity as you go, and put em online. Preferably things a potential employer could look at.
There's a night and day difference between asking a newbie engineer about their ideas in an interview vs talking about something they've built before.
I made a bad chess game in JS before applying for jobs after college, and ended up talking about it in half my interviews - either describing it, or, in a few cases, finding that the interviewer had played it before I showed up (in one case he found some bugs! I brushed it off, saying that I had quit the project after getting basic functionality down and hadn't thoroughly tested pawn promotion...).
I've found that, for people without a pedigree, having 6 or more live projects or one large live project tends to be enough to substitute for that and get many candidates through to initial interviews at many startups in SV.
I may just be another bootcamp grad, but the people who hired me said having multiple side-projects in Github was a factor, and it's certainly a factor when I'm interviewing and hiring similarly.
Maybe I succeeded despite working like this, but I tend to think I succeeded because I worked like this.