I'm torn because on the one hand, having a large gap after only 1.5 years of employment is a bit of a red flag. On the other hand, you do want to stand out. So

I'm torn because on the one hand, having a large gap after only 1.5 years of employment is a bit of a red flag. On the other hand, you do want to stand out. So let's put the first one aside for a moment. If I were looking at your CV I'd want to find something, anything interesting. A cool side project, your work in some community, something that makes me want to talk to you. If you have a GitHub, I would like to see something that catches my eye. What I don't want to see are a bunch of forked repos with minimal contributions in it or todo list apps. If you can show that you worked in more than one language to a substantial degree, that's also a plus because it shows you can learn. Also, maybe landing a conference talk would help. When it comes to the interview part, I sadly often meet people who don't understand the fundamentals. Like if someone is asked to write a web app and doesn't understand HTTP. Specifically, things like not every request needing to have a content-length header. I'd love to see that you know what a race condition is and how to avoid it when writing code. Same for security, know your vulnerabilities and what coding methods to use to avoid them. I know this is a lot to ask for. However, I wouldn't go and learn another JS stack, they come and go and I trust that if you have your basics in order, you'll learn a tech stack or even programming language in no time. But then again, that's just me and I have a tendency to not hire juniors due to the small team sizes I work in and the relatively large overhead a junior tends to represent. In other words, I don't have a lot of experience hiring juniors. Another thing, you may want to try and apply above junior level, even if you'll get lots of rejections, if you're good you may land something that way.