Here is my humble recommendation: 1) Contribute to (or just read the code of) open source projects in order to improve your coding skills 2) Read up on existi

Here is my humble recommendation: 1) Contribute to (or just read the code of) open source projects in order to improve your coding skills 2) Read up on existing research in topics you're interested in I understand the desire to be efficient and kill two birds with one stone. However, finding a good, active, community built research project might be a bit difficult. Even if you find it, you may find that opportunities for you to contribute to it are very few. Contributing to open source projects will give you a good opportunity to understand the open source contributing process (which you'll need to know when you do find that open source project you want to contribute to). It'll also allow you improve you coding skills while you're at it. Reading research papers gives you much more bang for your buck in terms of developing your research interest, though is not very resume-able. But, who knows, maybe your reading will spark your own open source research project.