> My plan is to take courses and build a nice portfolio and then just go to technology Meetups and network with others and pass out my cards with my portfolio on them. Is that enough to get me in the door?
That is a decent plan. If your goal is frontend web development you don't need to know the latest and greatest tools or frameworks to impress a potential employer - those come and go all the time. Take some time to brush up on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (just those three) and figure out how to get them to work together to make something. If you can demonstrate that much, anything else they need you to do can be easily taught.
As for meeting peers and potential clients - meetups are a great place, and you'll find tons of people there doing the same thing - shaking hands, passing out cards, and making connections. Personally I haven't turned up much work from doing this so I don't spend a lot of time in it.
Where I have reliably found work is online. Not on those fiver, 99designs, or cheap websites. Not on Odesk, Elance, or those other freelancer sites - but on actual job boards, like the job board on SmashingMagazine, or the job board on CSS Tricks. Those types of boards have all sorts of jobs - my best client so far hired me for a 4-hour project after originally saying No, and now they feed me tons of work.
Good luck getting started, this is totally a career path you can achieve!
