boxhopkins-deactivated20120309 asked: I'm a cs major at UNF. This past year has been my first programming in any capacity. I was always interested in learning but I was hesitant about self learning. Now that I'm in in the program, I have found that I LOVE it.. At least for now lol. Currently I'm taking cs ii, which is learning object oriented programming with java. Sorry for the long intro, but my question is this: Realizing that learning the basics is crucial first, what can I do to produce something useful beyond the classroom?
That’s awesome! Welcome to computer science, we have a lot of fun here.
To answer your question, it all comes down to “see a need, fill a need”.
Actively find things in you do that could be automated. CLI tools are my personal favorite for this kind of things, because I get to focus on problem solving instead of designing GUIs. I wrote a lot of Java CLIs back in high school, each of which were probably used less than three times. Making them was mostly a personal dare.
Since you know Java, making something for Android devices shouldn’t be too much of a stretch for you. My iOS app, ChordPad, came about because my sister didn’t like dealing with printouts of chord charts, so I made the charts into an app.
I wish I could tell you “go and make a program that does this”, but that’s something you have to figure out for yourself. The thing is, a lot of the stuff you make won’t be useful to anyone else. BUT, it’s good practice for when you actually make something that ends up being really useful, and it’s great exercise for your brain.
