[brewerhimself]

I was thinking about working on a Reddit clone while making some open source contributions. How does that sound?

[bonesinger]

Go for it man! the RoR Tutorial builds a twitter clone. The process of making the clone is the learning period.

Once I'm done with going through RoR, I want to develop my own blog from scratch.

I'm also taking some Udacity classes and Coursera as well.

Lastly, get involved, do some volunteer work (e.g. design a site for a nonprofit, church, whatever..)

Those kids from Standford started programming at a young age, but they built up a nice portfolio, you should do the same.

[brewerhimself]

Shoot me an email at [e-mail] sometime; I'd be interested to hear what you think about Udacity. I'm taking the Introduction to Statistics class right now myself.