[thetabyte]

There are a number of things you can do (which most other posts are covering) but there is one I want to focus on: internships.

If you are in the financial situation to do so (especially if you are still in school) find an (people won't like me saying this) unpaid internship. At 17, in high school, living in the middle of nowhere, I put up my resume (with very little web development skills) on HackerNews saying I would work for free, remotely, about 8 hours a week. I got 10 responses. I took one doing Ruby on Rails with an organization that did pair programming exclusively and I learned more than I did in years of Java classes. With this training, I was able to find a two month paid internship in Ruby on Rails this summer, and hopefully this chain will continue upward into jobs. I cannot explain the value of on-the-job learning and experience, and if an unpaid internship is what it takes to get you there, I really recommend it.

In the meantime: -Learn git inside and out if you don't know it -Pursue a web development framework -If you have programmer friends, get together and code with them. Productive people make you more productive. -Whatever you do, put yourself out there. The more you are out there, the more opportunities will come your way.