One thing you could do is get involved in a programming community. There are thousands out there but the one I recommend is called Stackoverflow. This is a programming question and answer site with some cool twists. For example answers are voted on by the community. Because of this the correct answers to the questions are almost always positioned at the top.

The feature that make this site useful for a programming job search is reputation. Stackoverflow’s reputation is a rough approximation of how much the Stackoverflow community trusts you. You gain reputation points by having your answers voted up by the community.  As you gain reputation you gain more the ability to do things on the site like edit questions, leave comments, or even delete duplicate questions.

Success in building reputation is evidence of a talented developer. This is something that you could even put on your resume. I even know of tech recruiters that use the site to locate tech talent based (at least partially) on reputation scores.

In closing if you want to develop your programming career you should consider getting invovled with Stackoverflow.