Given that in little over a month's time I'll be finishing up with college lectures for good and preparing for my final exams, I'm sure everyone expects myself and other students in the same position to be working furiously to finish projects and study what we've learned this semester. However, with two weeks off for Easter, I've not looked at a single college assignment, project or set of notes.
Instead, I've spent my time adding features to some side-projects, fixing some of their more obscure bugs and actually starting one or two completely new ones. This is how I intend on spending my break, or at least the first half of it. It's relaxing and refreshing. I'm delighted to be back coding without the worry of exams or deadlines hovering over me.
It's for this reason that I encourage any programmer, experienced or newbie, to think of something you'd like to build and just go build it. My current project is a JavaScript game-engine, to coincide with all this commotion over HTML5 that's been going on for a couple of years. I've also created a small Node.js program which converts all my custom-formatted comments in this game-engine into actual Markdown documentation.
I'm developing this project for myself, with very little thought being placed on other people using it or even caring about it (though of course it's open-source and there for anyone to hack away at). It's helping me build upon my JavaScript knowledge and giving me a tiny glimpse into the game development world, since most of my work up until this point has focused on the web.
Reading programming books is great, as is following tutorials and browsing through your favourite developer's blog posts, but none of that compares to the lessons you learn by actually going out and developing your own piece of software, no matter how big or small.
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