programming 8+ hours a day
From both my experience and what little research I've done on this topic, programmers do not program 8+ hours per day.
Do you have any more information on this?
My personal experience has been that it's almost impossible to consistently put in more than about 2 hours/day of highly focused 'flow' coding. I was previously worried that there was something wrong, but at this pace I'm able to complete big projects on a regular basis. Could this be normal even for productive programmers?
Lots of people (particularly people associated with LessWrong) are telling me I should become a computer programmer; in response I've taught myself a little Python using this site, written a couple Python scripts on my own, and just now sent in an application to App Academy. But if I don't end up going to App Academy, what's the best way to develop some actually marketable programming skills? I've heard people recommending getting involved in open source projects on Git Hub, but when I looked at Git Hub I found it overwhelming, with no idea of how to find a suitable project to work on. Advice?