What's worked for me is what I retrospectively have come to call "Trojan Horsing", whereby you use interdisciplinary fields to move diagonally through one or more institutions. Being lucky doesn't hurt, either.
[incoming potentially helpful, very self-indulgent summary of what that looked like for me]
I was one of those teenagers who always wanted to be a web dev but ended up majoring in biochem because I felt that, while both were interesting to me, self-teaching web dev was working for me and it's not easy to get your hands on centrifuges.
I made sure that my masters (experimental medicine) would encorporate wet lab work, as well as a big machine learning part (since that got me closer to code) and wound-up falling in love. After I submitted my thesis, I applied on a lark as an ML dev after I saw an ad on HN for an oppening at large-ish software company. This was a scary time and I was sure I wouldn't get it. The hiring manager had a PhD in CS, it was a Scala job and I never wrote a line of it, and I had a hard biology background. But I aced the take-home technical they gave me and snagged the job.
I'm now doing my PhD in Electrical Engineering to get that formal background in ML and could promise you I never knew exactly how I would make this diagonal move, but always felt it was likely.
[how I see that drawn out anecdote to apply to your case]
You have a background in 3D modelling and FEA, and I would suspect (though may be wrong) that there are plenty of positions that are looking for tools development for e.g. Engineering or Animation (the Autodesks of the world). Do you think that's something you'd be interested in/can learn? You seem to be a self-starter, which is key in this sort of thing.
Include in your search positions that don't have developer in the word but are technical roles in e.g. 3D modelling that would require you or benefit from you coding now and then.
Finally, the GitHub stuff is largely ignored from my understanding. It's great to give back to the community, you can meet great people (some of them who hire people), but short of that it isn't really an application boost.
[incoming potentially helpful, very self-indulgent summary of what that looked like for me]
I was one of those teenagers who always wanted to be a web dev but ended up majoring in biochem because I felt that, while both were interesting to me, self-teaching web dev was working for me and it's not easy to get your hands on centrifuges.
I made sure that my masters (experimental medicine) would encorporate wet lab work, as well as a big machine learning part (since that got me closer to code) and wound-up falling in love. After I submitted my thesis, I applied on a lark as an ML dev after I saw an ad on HN for an oppening at large-ish software company. This was a scary time and I was sure I wouldn't get it. The hiring manager had a PhD in CS, it was a Scala job and I never wrote a line of it, and I had a hard biology background. But I aced the take-home technical they gave me and snagged the job.
I'm now doing my PhD in Electrical Engineering to get that formal background in ML and could promise you I never knew exactly how I would make this diagonal move, but always felt it was likely.
[how I see that drawn out anecdote to apply to your case]
You have a background in 3D modelling and FEA, and I would suspect (though may be wrong) that there are plenty of positions that are looking for tools development for e.g. Engineering or Animation (the Autodesks of the world). Do you think that's something you'd be interested in/can learn? You seem to be a self-starter, which is key in this sort of thing.
Include in your search positions that don't have developer in the word but are technical roles in e.g. 3D modelling that would require you or benefit from you coding now and then.
Finally, the GitHub stuff is largely ignored from my understanding. It's great to give back to the community, you can meet great people (some of them who hire people), but short of that it isn't really an application boost.
Best of luck!