Some of these are good side projects. Some are great to practice. Some are meta. All aim to be timeless or at least widely applicable. A living document. Suggestions welcome.

• Contribute to an Open Source project.
• Write personal code every day for a year.
• Frontpage your project on HN/Product Hunt/Comparable.
• Visualize a public data set that's useful to people.
• Have an answer get over 100 votes on StackOverflow.
• Launch a mobile app on the Apple App Store/Google Play.
• Complete a technical course on Coursera/equivalent.
• Write a rant about engineering/software/a tool you use.
• Write an article on a widely read web publication (you must go through an editor).
• Build and deploy a personal website from scratch.
• Program in a language other than English.
• Program without a keyboard.
• Go on call for a critical service.
• Write a whole book.
• Teach a beginner how to program.

• A pomodoro app.
• TodoMVC
• A chat client.
• A basic spam filter.

• Work through Programming Pearls.
• Read The Effective Engineer
• Read What Every Programmer Should Know About Memory.
• Read The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
• Read The Architecture of Open Source Applications
• Read The Performance of Open Source Applications
• Read (and practice) The 12 Factor App
• Know what FizzBuzz is and why it matters.
• Understand Gitflow and have opinions on when to use it/not.
• Read a book on Test Driven Development

• Learn Markdown
• Run a MapReduce job on openly available data.
• Personally rack a server.
• Use only functional language code in a project.
• Master FlexBox
• Do the advanced stuff in Git Immersion
• Java
  • Read through the core libraries
  • Understand + use a library like Guava
  • Learn a mocking framework like Mockito
• Python
  • TODO
• Vim/some other inferior editor.
  • Quit using the arrow keys and backspace. Seriously.
  • Use a macro.
  • Use marks.
  • Know how to switch case without deletion.
  • Learn how to pretty print and auto-indent.

• Regularly use a tool like Hemingwayapp to make sure your communication is on point.
• Take a writing intensive course.
• Have a daily stretching routine. Programmers have bad posture.
• Get a standing desk.