get involved in some interesting open source community, and more specifically in a popular project. this will do two things - one, it will let you write code t

get involved in some interesting open source community, and more specifically in a popular project. this will do two things - one, it will let you write code that keeps you engaged, without needing to come up with ideas for something to write from scratch, and two, working on a large and active project with multiple contributors, mailing list, irc channel, etc. will be helpful with social skills (at least as far as interacting with other developers goes) and might even act as a form of networking (i've seen several job posts made directly to community mailing lists, especially if the job is for a non-mainstream language or framework). if you can list some of the things you've found fun or exciting to work with in the past, we can help make more specific suggestions of areas to explore.