How honest would you like feedback? Feel good or brutal?

@rkeet Brutal. I can take it. I've been through some pretty serious problems. Whatever it is, I'll work on it if I can. If it's something I can't fix (like my age or that huge gap in my work history) I'll roll with it and do the best I can.

hmmm... downvote, but no criticism

@Snow None of those details are personal. There are no email addresses or phone numbers. They're all part of very public online profiles and they're also effectively part of my résumé which is the focus of the question. If people can't look at my profiles, they can't answer the question. If people can't view my online activity, they can't hire me, either. Please roll back your edit.

Rolled back. If you're ok with the risks, then that's fine.

This part is very important: I lack a proper design portfolio. This is partially due to my work hiatus and partially due to poor organization skills on my part. I have been very active on CodePen and GitHub, though. Since you want to aim at being a front end specialist, a portfolio is pretty much a necessity, especially while lacking formal education and after long hiatuses.

I'm voting to close this question as off-topic because you're asking for a review of your profile, which may include giving career advice specific to you - that's unlikely to be helpful to anyone else (it's usefulness also depends on the links staying up and not changing - that's bad). It would be better if you could break it down into smaller, more general, parts, e.g. ask how you could make up for lacking a formal education. If you can't, or don't want to, do that, this question may be accepted as is on The Workplace Chat / The Water Cooler.

Your military experience on your resume (10/1997 - 8/1998) is inconsistent with your LinkedIn profile (12/1991 - 2/1999). If I were the hiring manager, I would throw your resume out once I spotted this.

How and when to address gaps in employment can make for a good question (although it might be a duplicate). Writing good resumes, cover letters and LinkedIn profiles is something entire books can be written about (although that doesn't quite fit on this site, I just hope you're sending a PDF resume and not a link to a web page). The end date for current employment should be "present" or similar - "indeterminate" sounds negative. Don't include an empty resume section. GitHub is a portfolio for a developer, and should put you above many / most other developers for those that care about that.

Voting to close, because The Workplace is not a resume review site.

@scaaahu I haven't double-checked yet, but the dates on LinkedIn are accurate for my entire time in service. I think the date you're looking at on my resume is for one specific job I had in the Army. I had more than one and it's not as easy to be granular about work experience on LinkedIn.

@Dukeling I'm not really asking for a review of my profile. My question is much more general... What am I doing wrong? and Where do I need to focus? The answer could as easily be You need to focus on developing your PHP skill. and it wouldn't have anything to do with my resume. I find it difficult to break down because I don't know exactly where the main problem is. I'm presenting my resume and my profiles because that's what I present when I apply for a job and I think it's all relevant to the question.

Some employers prefer ex-military people because they are more disciplined. However, if they think you lied about the military service time on your resume, the military service experience just becomes a huge minus because they would think you are a very un-disciplined person.

@DavidK I didn't ask for a review of my resume. I asked what I'm doing wrong. I presented my resume along with my public profiles because I present those things when I apply for a job and I don't know where the biggest part of the problem is.

@Martijn Where's the 404 error coming from? It's static HTML/CSS/JS and hosted at GitHub. There shouldn't be any 404s unless the entire site is down.

@scaaahu I have to put it that way. I was in for 7 years, but the first 5+ years of it was as a radio specialist. None of that is relevant to the jobs I'm applying to. I can easily verify my military service.

Exactly because the military experience is easily verifiable, Do Not omit the duration. You are who you are.

@Vince You asked us to read your resume and tell you what is wrong with it. That is the very definition of reviewing a resume. This type of question is not on-topic here because it won't be useful to anyone else who visits this site. Some people may have the same issues with their resume as you, but they would not be able to search for this question in any meaningful way.

@Vince Whether you call it a review or not, asking us to tell you what's wrong with your profile is off topic. Being unable to narrow your question down unfortunately doesn't make it appropriate for this site - that's why I recommended asking on Chat instead (assuming you haven't gotten a sufficient answer already, or in future). As a note: I also mentioned cover letters because you can probably get some interviews with an excellent cover letter and a profile that's much worse than yours, and a bad cover letter can kill a good profile (and don't underestimate the importance of resume layout).

Although actually you did manage to narrow it down to a few possible problem areas (gap, education, portfolio) - we can't really tell you which of those is the biggest problem, because any given employer will have their own opinion about that, but we can help you best address each of those problems, if you separate it into one problem per post.

@DavidK I didn't ask people to read my resume. Read the question again. I only said "Here's my resume" The question I'm asking everyone is the third paragraph: I'm hoping someone here can help me identify the biggest problem with what I'm doing so I can focus on fixing that first.

@Vince Please come over to our chat room The Workplace Chat. We usually offer this kind of advice there.

@Dukeling I didn't ask people to tell me what's wrong with my profile. I asked people to tell me what's wrong with what I'm doing. It's all in the 3rd paragraph and it's about my process, not my resume or any of the 6 profiles I included. I got a lot of awesome feedback here. I'll be making a lot of changes based on it. It was mostly focused on my resume, but not because I asked for a resume review. It's because my resume sucks. I think my cover letters are better, but they're different for every job. I use a conversational tone and address the requirements of the job specifically.

Your resume site looks great in Chrome, but it is a hot mess in Internet Explorer because you're using javascript that isn't supported in IE11. As a web developer, IE certainly isn't my first choice for personal use, but I still need my code to run on all of the popular, modern browsers. If the person reviewing your resume happens to be using IE, you're hosed.

@Dukeling Indeterminate is more technically accurate because I still take on occasional freelance projects even though I'm mostly unemployed, but you're right. The tone and attitude of my resume is all wrong. I am sending out a PDF version, but it's just a print out of the web site. Even though my print stylesheet is carefully crafted, I think I need to put more effort into a separate PDF. (I'm sorry if I'm responding to these out of order... there's a lot of comments here.)

As I said in my previous comment, one single problem can let the hiring manager throw your resume away. There is no such thing as "what is the biggest problem?" because once a serious problem is found, it's in the trash bin. What made you think HR/hiring managers will read the whole resume?

@Vince As a final bit (after your big edit update): Good luck. Once you've managed to re-find fun for yourself and become somewhat happier, try Holland for remote jobs. We have a serious shortage (Dutch, but use Google Translate) of developers, including front-end'ers. If you put your effort where your mouth is, they even pay decently ;-) Remote workers too.