As theunamedguy said, open-source is pretty cool. If you contribute in a significant way to a couple major projects (programming languages, like Python or Ruby,

As theunamedguy said, open-source is pretty cool. If you contribute in a significant way to a couple major projects (programming languages, like Python or Ruby, major platforms like Rails, Sinatra, Node, io.js, major libraries like Underscore.js, Angular, Ember, etc.) that will look really good on your resume. Also, if you keep hacking away at side projects until you get a few successful ones under your belt (like tiny libraries, for animation, forms, markup, the command line, etc.) that will also show that you're competent and know your stuff. Just wanted to say: Fellow college student here. I'm still working on getting the first real foundation of programming down, but I think we're in a pretty good spot.