What you should really do is make a complete system and put it out there for people to use. A web service, an iPhone application, a desktop application, whatever. There are no educational prerequisites which prevent you from doing this.
This will give you something to put on a resume, experience getting something done from start to finish, more general programming experience, and possibly the foundations of your own startup. It will also let you know if this sort of life is something you even want to do. If you didn't enjoy the process or you couldn't get anything out the door, chances are you might be better suited for something else. This website is hacker and startup oriented, but truth be told that sort of thing isn't the best fit for everyone and there are many other paths to success. It's better to figure this out when you're 20 and then adjust accordingly.
Yes. Making stuff is the way to learn, the way to meet smart people, and the way to increase your morale.
Remember, too, that 20 is still way young. It feels old to you, because it's the oldest you've ever been, but you haven't really cut off any options yet.
I may be seeing an imaginary distinction, but it would be great if you'd put down your thoughts
menloparkbum said (emphasis mine) "What you should really do is make a complete system and put it out there for people to use. A web service, an iPhone application, a desktop application, whatever. "
pg replied "Yes. Making stuff is the way to learn, the way to meet smart people, and the way to increase your morale."
If the OP were to build a significant library or subsystem for an existing language/ecosystem, say a natural language processing library in Erlang (I know some people who need something like this today), or create a version of Django with SQLAlchemy, that also worked well with django-admin (I know people who need this too) that would count (I think) as "making stuff" (pg) but not necessarily "make a complete system" (menloparkbum).
So is it necessary to build a complete system (a webapp that uses the NLP library), or is significantly enhancing an existing system (just writing an NLP library, with just enough usecases to drive the library design) enough (to make progress)?
I was indeed trying to make a distinction between a library and a full application or web site. From an entrepreneurial perspective I think it's important to focus on products rather than libraries. It's far easier to monetize a twitter client than it is a twitter library.
If you want to get a programming job it's a good idea to publish a lot of stuff to github. Personally I find it more satisfying to build applications vs. libraries. Others find the opposite to be true.
I didn't start college at all until I was about 20. I'm shocked that anyone thinks it might be "too late to turn it around". When I was 20 I hadn't even settled on a direction yet, much less decided I wanted to turn it around.
I started college at 20 too - when I was 18, I was absolutely certain that I would never go to college. (Strangely, at 15 I was absolutely certain I would never work for anyone else, which is exactly what I did in my gap year between 19 and 20. And all through college, I was absolutely certain I'd never work for a big company, which I'm doing now.)
