First find a cool project that you find fun to work on. (a game, a tool to help you do something) Regardless if you ever make money on it, it'd be worth it jus

First find a cool project that you find fun to work on. (a game, a tool to help you do something) Regardless if you ever make money on it, it'd be worth it just to use it or play it yourself. Thats pretty much the exact process that lead to the creation of Ruby on Rails by 37signals and I imagine countless other projects/businesses. Then later on when its stable and usable consider launching it to the world, sharing the valuable software you've created. (and possibly receiving value back) In the process of building it, if you get stuck, read/post on HN and go to stackoverflow to ask programming questions, you'll get there.